Bed Stuy Reno

Bookshelf Sketches

Lowboy Bookshelf Construction Progress

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!