Bed Stuy Reno

So, getting back to the house and our work. The desk and return were the last pieces to our lower level built-in bookshelf puzzle. We wanted a built-in desk near the kitchen so that if one of us was working (say on a blog or something like that), we could still be near the central action of the kitchen. Also, it would be a useful location to stash the computer for looking up recpies, playing music, etc.

The “return” portion, as we call it, returns out into the room, and does what we always told people we wanted it to do – divides the kitchen area from the living area, giving scale to each space, without visually closing them off from eachother.

The construction technique, clearly, was the same as with the rest of the project, but here on the return and in the desk’s open shelving, we doubled up on the depth. This was so the return could hold some of our larger books, and the desk shelving could hold file hangers and have room leftover for odds and ends.

In the end, both G and I were happy with the results – it looked a lot like what we had designed, didn’t cost a lot to build, and was an enjoyable project to boot. All in, our costs were around $600 bucks for the total project. One of the largest expenses were the self-drilling hex-head screws that we used – we liked how they looked when screwed into the joist hangers. As I mentioned before, the wood was your basic Lowe’s 2x8x10′s (maybe $5 a board), and the joist hangers were something like $0.59 cents a pop. (I’m not proud with how ruthless we were, but when we finished the project, we did actually return the chopsaw! We were working on a budget after all . . .) Most importantly, it put our mark on the lower level, and was a great focal point to the room. With all our books and objects in it, art on the walls over and around it, we felt it warmed up the house and gave it our own character.

The Tallboy is our floor-to-ceiling section of the built-in bookshelf. G and I used the same techniques as on the Lowboy, except it was a little more difficult to put together because of its height. We prepped all the horizontals first, by cutting them to size, and outfitting them with their “shoes,” the metal joist hangers. Once those were ready, we started by laying the base. Then we screwed the horizontals into each vertical, and raised the assembly into place one at a time, sort of like a barn-raising.

Once the whole shelf was assembled, we did tie this one back to the wall with masonry anchors and angles hidden strategically from view on the upper shelves. It is one solid bookshelf.

Bookshelf Sketches

Et voila. The lowboy, or the first piece of our bookshelf project we finally built. The R&D phase for our bookshelves was about three years. OK, maybe two years. It was just something we were constantly planning and talking about in the background of everything else that was going on at the time with the house. So we had a lot of time to think about how they should look, and how we were going to build them.

G and I had grand aspirations of interlocking horizontals and verticals, but after buying a router and trying out some interlocking mockups on my own, it became clear I just didn’t have the control or know ability to get the look we want.

Similarly, we had some big ideas at first about the material – we wanted something solid and with real weight, as this would be the anchor piece for the lower level. We looked at walnut, cherry, birch, and pine. We wanted something thick – at least an inch, but every place I was calling quoted prices out of our range on the amount of wood we estimated we needed – even simple pine was going to cost us upwards of a thousand dollars, and that was before we even started figuring in hardware and tools.

SO, it was back to the drawing board a little bit – we went to Lowe’s to check out their lumber, and G flashed on their construction grade pine. We liked the look of the 2×8 boards. Actual size is more like 1.5” x 6.5”. They came in 8 and 10 foot lengths, and they were cheap. Maybe $5 a board. Really cheap.

And then we looked at hardware – joist hangers in particular. We thought we could use them to tie our verticals to our horizontals, instead of routing the verticals and locking in the horizontals. And they looked cool to us. We liked the industrialness of the hardware, with the rough unfinished look of the lumber. We bought a chopsaw with a blade big enough to handle the 2x8s in one go, and spent two hours picking through the stacks of lumber at Lowe’s two find the boards we liked.

When we got all the stuff back home, it was actually not hard to get the lowboy done. We did it in one day. With all our drawing and planning, the thing actually came together as planned. And, we thought, it looked pretty good!