Growing up I spent a lot of my free time with my grandfather in his workshop. He was a general contractor and I spent several summers as I got older working side-by-side with him as he build homes in mid-Ohio. I learned a great deal from him (Such as, did you know there is a wrong way to shovel gravel? Well, there is, and he taught me that!) and had a great time doing it.
I’ve been slowly collecting tools over the years and have turned a portion of our basement in to a workshop complete with a homemade work bench. I’ve done a few small projects around the house but about six months ago I decided to take on a much larger project: Built-in bookshelves. I had a perfect wall for built-ins in my home office and, given the fact that I’m an avid reader and book collector, I needed the display space.
I turned first to the Internet for ideas and instruction and found this great article by Joseph Truini on the Popular Mechanics web site. I went through several drafts of plans, customizing the look-and-feel to what I wanted (painted shelves versus stained, for example) and began looking for a time when I could start construction.
I ended up having a day to myself the Saturday of the Ohio State – Michigan football game and I decided to take advantage of the lack of “help” from the boys to get things started. I avoided any big mistakes by planning out all of the details in painstaking accuracy (four decimals on my measurements) and by making sure that I always measured twice before cutting once. Below is a gallery of my results.
