Ah, poison. I just don’t get enough of it in my day to day life. So it was nice to step back during this project and be able to throw up clouds of dust and contaminate my working environment, just great…
Ok, yeah, so that is sarcasm. This was one of the messiest projects I’ve worked on for a long time. I had the dust mask on from start to well after finish. I banned my wife and kids from opening the workshop door, and spent 3 days cleaning, dusting and vacuuming up at the end. Lesson learned? I need proper dust collection in the shop.
So, why did I make it from MDF and put myself through all the dust? A few reasons really.
- I’ve had three long lengths of MDF sitting in the workshop for maybe 6 months now. I think they were offcuts from a kitchen install which I inherited somehow. They take up a lot of space.
- I knew I would want to paint the bookshelf so MDF is the perfect material for that.
- I’m trying hard to not waste any money at the moment and also clean out the workshop. A bookshelf from existing materials is two birds with one stone.
But enough about that. The actual project itself was a success at least. It’s a bookshelf which will live in one of our living rooms, the one which the kids spend most of their time in. That room is a step down from the rest of the house, and as such, it has a short step along the wall on each side of the doorway which is effectively, pretty useless. It’s quite a narrow step, too narrow to comfortably sit on but the perfect depth to stack up novels. It seems to attract junk and toys fairly well too.
My girls don’t have a good place to store books, mainly because they have so many toys and junk lying around their room. I thought if they could stack their books up neatly and have them always accessible there would be a slightly greater chance of them reading more. Wishful thinking maybe.
For all the complaints I have about the dust, I must admit I did enjoy building this project. It all came together really quickly and easily. Everything just worked out right as I built it. It was perfectly square, I didn’t make any huge mistakes, and most importantly I think it looks really nice in the room.
The bottom and top embellishments are simply skirting boards which have been cut to fit snugly around the frame. It made a huge difference to the look of the project once I installed them, it really took the bookshelf from being a few lengths of wood to being a proper piece of furniture.
I’ve given it 3 coats of white paint for the moment. I’ve a feeling that I might repaint this room over the summer and I may change the walls from the light blue to something different. I figured if I just leave the shelf white for now I can easily repaint in a different shade later on.
And does it work, do they read more? Well, possibly, but it’s hard to tell to be honest. What I can see is that they at least always know where their current novel is, so I’ll take that for now.
I’m still editing together my workbench build at the moment. I finished the bench a couple of weeks back but the video is far longer that I want. I’ve a feeling it will be a two-part video, fingers crossed I can get the first part out next week. Here’s a teaser photo of the bench, I’m really, really happy with how this has turned out.
