furniture building ... take two.

So it is springtime of course which means among other things it is apparently time to try my hand at building another piece of furniture. I was seriously all set to buy the Kent bookcase from Pottery Barn until seeing it in the store - thank goodness. Yes - some of their furniture is beautiful and totally heirloom quality ... that bookcase though - was not. It felt like a light breeze would blow it over. And the glass doors - a classy idea and what really appealed to me - were hinged on cheap, plastic tracks that felt - well - just cheap.

So ... I dug out an old receipt from Chom's Chevron in good ol' Marblemount dated eight-twenty-six-twenty-eleven. After a climbing weekend (a night at the Newhalem campground followed by a night atop Sourdough) we had stopped in Mount Vernon at this little spectacular sandwich shop. Next door to it was a random antique store where we wandered through and there in the far corner where the sun was streaming in was a cool bookcase. 'I could build that' I said to myself. So I pulled out the only scrap of paper I had at the time - that receipt - and scrawled on the back of it -

Seemed pretty simple. Some 2x2s, 1x2s and veneered plywood. I had taken a lot of pics of it on my good ol' iPhone 2G but ... that died on my backpacking trip out to Whatcom Pass a couple weeks later and they were lost for good. But luckily - I had that receipt.

So from that I fashioned a more detailed plan -

Some actual measurements and - well - a layout for how I was going to cut all the pieces out of the 4x8 sheets of plywood.

Then it was time to take a trip to good ol' Gray's Lumber off Sixth Ave in Tacoma (where I got all the lumber for J's bed - much, much better than the crap you find at the Home Depots and such). And surprisingly - their veneered plywood was only thirty bucks a sheet. I also picked up the fir 2x2s and 1x2s.

My plan then was to get four sheets of half-inch stuff - then glue them together so each face would be veneered (since you can see the outside and inside of the panels on a bookshelf). Plus - then the indent of the panels and such with the 2x2 posts would only be about 3/8" (I'm going to plane the 2x2s and 1x2s slightly to shave off just a bit of the dirty stuff and get down to the really nice, clean wood).

So then - starting with a big pile of lumber -

And then after hauling it to Katie's parents' place to have her dad help with his slightly-more-solid table saw to cut down the 4x8 sheets -

And then - glueing all the sheets up -

Now - time to start planing the 2x2s and 1x2s. Putting it together will involve about 3.7 billion pocket hole screws so I may splurge for one of the Kreg face clamps - much faster than loosening/tightening my C-clamp that many billions of times ...

april first.

So after finally finishing a couple-month-long project completely unrelated to anything of a remodeling nature I finally got to head out this afternoon to dig in the dirt a little as the sun waned in the sky and when the wind picked up it was downright chilly for an April day in the northwest. Maybe we'll be in for another cool/wet spring like last year.

But no thing today - picked the winter's weeds and planted some lavender and daffodils and winter creeper I had picked up at the Home Depot.

I do love my little house in the springtime of the year when the colours pop and the sun peeks out for an afternoon late as it sets and I head in feet half-numb hands cold downright chilled to flick on porch lights and let the glow waft outside.