Welcome to quarantine. Like most folks during this COVID quarantine I took to working in my garage for a lot of it, finishing up some projects that had been stacking up.
With a baby on the way my wife and I were being extra cautious around not going to stores. This meant that I if I was going to complete our nursery furniture before the baby got here I would need to get creative!
The first piece we wanted to make for the nursery was a bookshelf. Because the nursery was already dinosaur themed, I wanted to design this shelf from the silhouette of a dinosaur. I had a piece of scrap wood that someone found at work – it was a 3′ by 2′ glued solid pine board. I cut this in half and combined it with some scrap 1 x 12 to make the sides. I commissioned my wife to design the dinosaur silhouette. I wanted the side to be almost entirely made up of the dinosaur so that there wasn’t a lot of blank space in the design (a space filling design?). I also wanted to incorporate a toy chest in the bottom that was extra deep and then 2-3 bookshelves above that. Here is my original design and then my wife’s (much better) redesign:
My wife carved the dinosaur out using some bits I got on the internet for my dremel. I was pretty worried that this design wasn’t going to look too hot because the two pieces of pine I combined to make the sides were not really the same color…
The bookshelf was slated to be 2′ wide but I really didn’t have many 2′ x 1′ planks that could easily serve as book shelves or as the large base which was going to measure ~ 2′ x 2′. In the end I used a piece of scrap plywood that was just barely big enough for the base. I had the plywood sit inside of the sides (if that makes sense) in order to hide the plywood edges. To hide the plywood in the front I took three 2′ long pine pieces that were ~1.5″ x 1.5″ and ripped them on the table saw at an angle of ~22.5 degrees and glued them together to form a sort of curved lower front piece. I heavily sanded it down to help with the curvature. I then glued this curve piece to the toy bin front piece, which was just a piece of 1 x 12.
For the three shelves I had to cobble together a bunch of wood. For one shelf I had all 2’+ but narrow pieces and was able to just glue them all on edge – no problem. For one shelf I had to glue some on edge and some end grain-to-end grain – not ideal, but the glue on the edges helped reinforce everything and it held just fine. For the final shelf I essentially had three short lengths of 1 x 12 that added up to 2 feet. The only option I had was an end grain-to-end grain joint. I did some research to find an end grain-to-end grain joint I thought I could easily implement. The problem with end grain is that there is not a lot of surface area to actually adhere to with glue – I saw it described as trying to glue two straws together by gluing them end-to-end. It just doesn’t really work that well. In the end I went with a 45 degree scarf joint. This simply just helps increase the surface area by cutting the end grain at a 45 degree angle. I used the miter saw and nipped the ends of my 1 x 12’s with a 45 degree angle and tried to glue them together.
Gluing a scarf joint like this together is not as easy as advertised! Because the wood is cut at a 45 degree angle you can’t clamp it boards on the end because they will just slide past one another. You also can’t set the two boards done flat on their faces and clamp the upper piece down to the lower piece because it will again just slide away. you sort of have to do a combination of both at the same time which can make this a little tricky to set up…I eventually figured it out. The joint wasn’t perfectly smooth but I sanded the hell out of it and it looked good enough for a kid’s bookshelf by the end.
Ever since I discovered how freakishly strong wood glue is, my wood screw usage has gone way way down. It’s probably not best practice to rely on wood glue as much as I do, but I’m just an amateur and frankly, it hasn’t let me down yet. With this in mind and considering this wasn’t a ladder or something meant to hold a lot of weight that I was building, I wanted to primarily use glue to hold this shelf together. I set one of the sides face down on the garage floor, on a cloth tarp and then attached the plywood base. Because you would never see the underside of this shelf and because it was such a large piece of wood and would hold a bunch of toys, I was okay with using screws here. I Kreg-ed the plywood base to the side of the shelf and then glued the toy bin front piece on (which included the lower rounded corner piece I made. Then I applied glue to the ends of all of the book shelves I had made and set them in place (using pre measured pencil lines of course). The I applied glue to the other ends of the shelves and dropped the other side on top and started clamping everything together while carefully lining it up. When all was said and done, it was a precarious technique but worked pretty well for this. I then added some little lips to the back of the book shelves so the books wouldn’t smack into the wall.
We then set about staining the piece. Home Depot has recently switched their wood stain suppliers from MinWax to Varathane it seems. I had picked up some Varathane stain + poly product for my coffee table re-redesign and for that project I honestly had no issues. For this project, however, this product was disastrous. I usually apply wood stains with a rag and they are usually solvent based (as opposed to water) and they are usually quite thin and you can spread them easily almost like water. This Varathane Stain + Poly is extremely thick and does not go on well and dries extremely quickly. It can be really hard, for example, to address spots where the stain pooled because by the time you realize it’s pooled, it has started to turn into a gel and if you touch it, it smears like a semi-solid instead of reacting like a liquid. We applied this to the book shelf and it looked horrible. We had to buff it out with a plastic sanding sponge in several spots and it still did not look good. It was super uneven and not easy to balance out after it quickly dried because the stain was mixed with the poly which sort of protected the globbed stain. I really wish I had used something else for this project as I think it would have come out a lot better looking with a traditional stain followed by a separate poly finish. =(
We didn’t want any backers on the book shelves (other than the lips) but we definitely did on the toy bin at the bottom so that the toys didn’t spill out the back and damage the drywall behind it. To solve this I had routered a vertical 1/4″ channel into the insides of the side panels and slid a piece of 1/4″ MDF into the slot and then secured it in place using some brad nails and a pre-stained length of pine underneath it.
We buffed the whole thing down to try to make it smooth to the touch and then added an additional layer of MinWax Polycrylic and called it a day! Project complete and made entirely from scrap pine, plywood, and MDF from my garage.
