Bookcases
I’ve been making a lot of bookcases recently. When we moved out of the house, I got rid of a lot of old, cheap bookcases, but I wasn’t quite so good at getting rid of books. So we need more bookcases.
First I made this oak one to fit in a spot at the end of a hallway.
That one was nice, but I quickly realized I was going to need to speed things up. At that rate, we were going to be living with boxes of books for a long time. So I scaled up production. I started making five simple boxes out of two layers of 1/2″ cherry plywood.
The two layers of 1/2″ seemed to yield better proportions than a single layer of 3/4″, but it has a few other advantages. It means that the nicer side of the plywood can face both in and out of the box. It also means that the inner layer can be assembled with nice, solid rabbet joints and screws, while the outer layer is miter joints. That means less edge trimming of exposed plywood.
This went pretty quickly, but there were an awful lot of holes to drill for the shelf pins:
I finished them with Danish oil, and I think they look pretty good. Here are three of them in the TV room.
They won’t be filled with books until I’m sure the oil has finished curing.
I love working with cherry, even though the color is often pretty uneven. I’m looking forward to seeing how it ages. I’ve got a set of built-ins in the office that I made decades ago, and they’ve developed a lovely dark color over the years.
You can find the design of the oak one here, and the cherry ones here.
