Day Seven-eighty-seven: bookshelf

So if you were worried about how we would spend our days without a kitchen or bathroom to redo, fear not. We have ways of keeping busy. In fact, the "to do" list seems to get longer after every project we complete.

We needed something to hold office supplies and whatnots and be a base for the printer. We'd been using a bookshelf but wanted something with drawers. We thought it would look a little more tidy. After some searching around online at several stores we settled on this piece from IKEA:

(photo courtesy of the IKEA website)

No problem. Whip down to the store. Pick it up from the self-serve warehouse. Spend an hour or so putting it together and presto we're done! Well, if you're a regular reader then you know that even our simplest projects are never that straight forward. Turns out, the dresser is somewhat shallow (no, we don't mean it's materialistic) and thus it was hard to get things into and out of the drawers. Quel dilemma. What to do? We pondered this a bit and thought, could we turn the pieces into a bookshelf? It was worth a try.

Here are all the basic components--shell of the dresser, a couple of drawer parts on top, and a piece of 1x2 pine that we had left over from another project.

One modification we had already made was to the feet. Instead of using the 6-inch pegs that came with the dresser, we replaced them with these little buns from Home Depot.

Our next step was to add an inner trim around the whole frame, both for appeal and to cover the ends of the supports for the shelves. We cut the 1x2 into the right lengths for the top, bottom, and sides and used the table saw to cut them lengthwise down the middle, making them roughly .75 x .75 inches. We glued and clamped everything in place.

The new trim is on the right of the two vertical pieces and the top layer across the bottom.

Next came making the supports. We didn't want to let all the wood from the drawers go to waste (and for once didn't want to make another trip to Home Depot), so we sliced up part of a drawer to make these pieces. We drilled holes through them the same size as the dowel rods that came with the dresser so we could reuse those.

Here are the supports installed with glue and dowels.

Finally we cut down the drawer fronts to fit the opening of our dresser-cum-bookshelf and laid them in to see the full effect.

Not a bad day's work. There's still the unavoidable sanding and staining (still deciding on whether to use clear or something else) to be done but otherwise this is ready to use and probably more sturdy than it was as a dresser. If IKEA starts offering a bookshelf like this then you'll know who sold them the design.