Overbooked

The biggest build to date – and the one that challenged (and honed) my carpentry skills the most while filling my power tool storage room at the same time – was the set of bookcases I built in the dining room/office/library. I am an avid collector of books and needed a place to store and display them all. My initial solution was to use the time-worn college dorm method of stacked boards and concrete blocks. While this certainly met my immediate needs in a Peter Pan sort of way, it by no means exemplified the “you’re a big boy now” look I hoped to ultimately achieve.

It’s important to note here that to know me is to know what a “muller” I am. Before taking the first step on a new project, I need to think it through completely from every angle possible so as to head in the right direction from the start. (I know – it’s a curse.) Knowing that, you can imagine how long it took me to settle on a design for these bookcases. Actually, I admit to being totally stymied and unable to find the quintessential design on my own in any of the (copious) photographs and examples from books and magazines I collected, cataloged, and studied. Then, an unexpected Christmas present fell right in my lap.

As I mentioned earlier, Hurricane Charlie was responsible for extensive water damage to all of the carpets in my house in August of 2004. After beginning the process of replacing the carpets with a floating hardwood floor, I had finally come to the point in laying the flooring in the dining room/office/library where I had to know exactly where the bookcases were going to be, as I needed to lay the floors up to – but not under – the (soon-to-be-built) bookcases. So there I was – still mulling over the bookcase design with no idea how big the “footprint” was eventually going to be, with boxes of flooring materials stacked up throughout the house.

Although I had recently subscribed to Workbench magazine, I had mostly flipped through the pages of the few issues that had arrived and put them aside, as none of the projects interested me at the time – until the December 2004 issue, that is. As I brought that issue in from the mailbox, there on the cover was the bookcase design I had been looking for. (Cue the chorus of heavenly voices.) Not only was the design exactly what I had been looking for, but complete step-by-step instructions with tons of photographs and illustrations were detailed on the pages inside.

Talk about Christmas coming early…!

Although the end result makes this project look really complicated, each bookcase is actually just a big box made of MDF sitting atop a smaller box made of MDF screwed side-by-side to identical boxes made of MDF. MDF, or “medium density fiberboard”, is inexpensive, smooth as glass, easy to paint, and much more dimensionally stable than real wood. Although it can be stained, the result doesn’t really mimic the look of stained lumber, so it lends itself better to a painted finish.

Additionally, painting also covers up any screw holes filled in by wood filler. Any other gaps or “learning curve” imperfections that might exist in the edges of the cases themselves or where they’re joined together are hidden by the trim molding.

The window seat is my own design (by that time, I was on a roll). The basic idea for the bookcases themselves (remember – MDF boxes) was so logical that using that same concept to make the leap to the window seat was merely a matter of a little math. It provides the perfect place for Hardy to sleep and keep watch over his food bowl in the nearby kitchen.

I couldn’t be more pleased and my books couldn’t be happier.

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