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 ...