Bookshelves

This is my first project. It’s a few years old, but it’s the seed from which my passion for building furniture grew.

There’s a bit of a story behind these shelves. Most of the wood used in these is recovered from another, much larger, single bookshelf that was about the same size as both of these together. It was gifted to my wife by an old friend of her mother’s, shortly before she passed away. Unfortunately, that old piece was poorly constructed; it barely survived the trip to our house and had to be reinforced by me when we got it home before we could use it. When we moved from that house I convinced my wife it would not survive another trip, and that it would be better if I disassembled it (which was frighteningly easy; no glue at all was used in the construction), and used the wood to build another bookshelf.

The original shelves were constructed out of pine, with 2×12s for the frame and the shelves were 1×12s nailed to cleats on the frame for support. Since I had to reuse as much of the wood as I could, I stayed with the 2×12 construction but I cut dadoes in the frame to support the shelves. So these ought to survive an H-bomb blast in my living room. I faced everything with 1×2s so that noone could tell from a distance what it was all made of.

But the wife is happy with them and seems to enjoy telling people who ask that I made them. Though I think that may be because she likes to see me blush. Obviously I see all the flaws with them, as I’m sure you could point out more than a few. But, I like that they are still part of a gift from a very sweet old lady, and that we could reuse the lumber for a good purpose.

-- We are all just one moment of arrogance away from disaster