Hello, and welcome to Part II of my slapdashtical furniture-fashioning endeavors! With a budget of $500 or less, I will attempt to rework my messy craft/office space into a more motivation-inspiring and professional-looking maker’s workshop. (Because you shouldn’t have to be an acrobat to get to your sewing table.)
In my last post, I mentioned that I had four fairly old bookcases, of the sort that were as cheap as they came when I got them between three and seven years ago, all comprised of particle board and covered in a vaguely wood-look black veneer. Two of those bookcases were easily disassembled in the middle. Two of them… not so much. So, while my previous foray into furniture upcycling required only a drill and a screwdriver, this one will necessitate a circular saw.
I’ll be honest: I don’t like saws, especially those of the electrical persuasion. But I’ve a steadier hand, a better eye, and more patience for squared lines than my husband, so I eventually decided there would be less opportunity for frustration from either of us if I just took a deep breath and did the thing myself.
The twist? I’m also the one with a Carpentry certificate. …Yep. I took one of those expedient courses from a technical college back in the spring of 2015, in the days shortly preceding my decision to go back to school full-time. There’s a lot that I love about carpentry: the possibilities are endless! And there’s… a lot that I don’t love: like manual labor, and electric saws.
¯_(ツ)_/¯ I digress.
It was just as well that these other bookcases weren’t as easily divided as the first two, because this time I needed to separate them into two drastically different heights. The first set needed to fit under my cutting table; the remainder would make a good base for another tall counter.
The base of my cutting table is one area of the renovation where I sought to cut costs. Rather than building a whole new structure, I am going to continue to use some of the storage units already keeping my 4’x8′ Homasote panel (my current cutting table) off the floor.
There was a variety of other hullabaloo under there, but what I intend to keep to this purpose are four drawer units, picked from IKEA at various points in recent history: two small RAST dressers, and two MICKE office drawer units (sans casters). RAST claims to be 26-3/4″ high, but by my measure they are actually 27-1/4″ at their tallest point, and MICKE stands just shy of that measurement, at 27-1/16″.
For those of you who use the metric system, please don’t cry. Just think of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and… well… that won’t clear anything up about why the Imperial measurement system is the way it is, but I hope we’ve established a feeling of camaraderie between us.
Since both of the RAST dressers will make up the bulk of the support for one end of the table, and MICKE is fairly narrow in width, I think I’ll use a couple bookcase slices as the foundation for the opposite end. Being that RAST is also the taller of the two IKEA models, I’ll cut the bookcases down equal to RAST’s height (27-1/4″), and MICKE will fit nicely in the middle of it all.
Into the garage go we.
Dismantling these shelves was a bit more of a pain than I had bargained for, of course. My new height measurement grazed the top of the screws holding a structural shelf in place, so I was unable to leave that shelf attached as it was.
These bookcases also had plastic covers stuck into the screw heads to disguise them. Two of those covers left behind enough plastic when I tried to remove them that I couldn’t get a screwdriver in there to remove the hardware. And, unlike the newer bookcases to which backboards were fastened with large pegs, the backboards of these units were fastened with small finishing nails… right to the board I was trying to remove. These obstacles were (thankfully) circumvented with some creative handling of a needle-nosed plier.
Once all the prep work had been accomplished, the rest was pretty easy: Measure twice. Cut once. Done. Circular saws demand a healthy amount of respect, but they’re also very efficient–especially when they’ve got one of those nice little laser pointers on the front.
Particle board is a bit shrapnel-esque, but that was easy enough to clean up with a quick file.
The top end of the bookcases got a few more inches shorter before I was done with them, theoretically matching the height of a ledge that sits midway up the wall (41-1/2″). It seems I didn’t take into account the plushness of the carpet when measuring from the underside of the baseboards, though, so on their own the newly-shorn shelves sit about 1/4″ too high against the wall. I’m hoping that, once the weight of a countertop and some books settles into the equation, they’ll sink right back down to the appropriate height.
Whereas the other bookcases I’d worked with had narrow boards across the top for support and squareness, these bookcases had none of that extra material. That meant the two new “halves” of the bookcase were kind of flimsy–especially the taller top portion of the bookcase. They didn’t hold their shape very well.
Enter a small swatch of new materials! (New-ish.)
I imagine every homeowner has at least a couple odds ‘n’ ends of lumber in their garage somewhere. It seems to be a requirement of do-it-yourselfers that we always have more materials than we actually need, either just in case or because another project fell through somewhere along the way. The 1″x2″ I used for this project is an example of just that.
I had been swayed into purchasing a set of Leonid Afremov Studio paintings not long after we moved, but I encountered a couple issues when they finally arrived on my doorstep: 1) I’d expected the canvases to be pre-stretched when I bought them, but to my subtle dismay they were simply rolled into a tube for transport, and 2) They don’t really match anything else in the house. I picked up a handful of 1″x2″s for the purpose of crafting my own stretchers, but when I realized I’d misplaced my staple gun, I quickly lost the patience for that project and let the buyer’s remorse have its way with me. (You win some; you lose some.)
Instead, I’m using one of the would-be stretcher boards as base support for that taller portion of my bookcases. Cut to width, I can fit this board in the bottom-front of the unit, and secure the old mid-support shelf atop those. Voila! Cabinet base. It’s a bit like having a toe kick on kitchen cabinets, but… without actually performing the function of a toe kick at all?
This is what I had to do to get there:
- Once the boards were cut (to a length of 23.5″), I drilled pilot holes into the center of each end.
- I’d ordered a small case of steel corner support brackets and 3/8″ screws from Amazon, and placed one in the center of each board, on the top inside edge, where it could then attach to the bottom of the old support shelf, tying the two components together.
- I measured where new holes needed to be placed on the sides of the bookcase, to accommodate the screws that would secure both the new board and the shelf to the unit.
- I made a template out of cardstock for the positioning of the new holes, to expedite the process of marking it up.
- Put holes in things.
- There were enough leftover screws from these and my other bookcases to attach the new board-and-shelf configuration to the sides of the unit.
- Tada! Now, vacuum the carpet…
This little addition to the project was both satisfying and a bit disappointing. Disappointing, because I seem to have started with a shelf, and ended up with a shelf that looked pretty much the same as it had in the beginning. Satisfying, though, because I was proud of having engineered this thing and made it match the build of the rest of my reconfigured shelving units.
High-fives all around.
There are still a couple extra things I want to do with these bookcase projects, but that will take a trip to the hardware store. My shopping list is as follows:
- (2x) 3/4″x4’x8′ MDF board
- (2x) 3/8″x4’x8′ hardboard
- (24 linear ft.) 1-1/4″ trim
- 1″ wire nails
- 3″ coarse-threaded drywall screws
- Cabinet paint (white and grey)
And there you have it. This list should pretty well take care of everything else I need for these tables.
If you’re curious to see how this all turns out in the end, check out my Instagram profile and keep an eye on my stories–I’ll be using those as my alert system for new blog posts until I can feel out a good reliable posting schedule.
Until next time: Stay safe. Wear protection.
Au revoir!
