Day Eight-seventy-seven: new bookshelves

We know you're waiting for an update on the bench, but we had to take a detour down bookshelf lane. The final missing furniture piece in the studio (where most of our projects have been lately) was to replace the existing, low-budget, and somewhat shaky bookshelves with something new. Fortunately, as we found out with the dresser we turned into bookshelves, IKEA products are solid pieces that are readily adaptable.

We started with these two shelves. They were bought at different times and stained at different times, which explains the non-matching color.

The height of these is fine so you're probably wondering, what we needed to modify? why not just move these over as-is to the studio? Well, you may have noticed that we said only that the height was fine. Standing next to each other in the available spot the shelves are too wide by about a foot. So after taking them apart (again, being from IKEA was a bonus here) we had to cut six inches off each shelf. The table saw made quick work of that. Then, slightly more tricky, we had to redrill holes on the cut side to match the predrilled ones.

Next was some cosmetic work. Where these bookshelves had been in the library you couldn't see all the extra holes that IKEA provided to allow you to put the shelves at different height options. In their new location at least one side of the shelves were going to be very visible and somewhat unsightly, so we decided to patch them.

With such a big space we needed some sort of filler before applying the spackle, so we cut .25-inch dowel rod into a ton of pieces and glued them into place.

After plugging, patching, sanding, and painting the extra holes are no more (the remaining ones are where we want to put the shelf).

Here you can see the extent of the holes that we had to plug.

With all that done we could apply the first coat of paint.

Next time we'll have updates on this project and the little bench.