I’m not sure exactly when I originally made this project. It was sometime when I was living in Wicker Park. What makes it hard to pin down is that I didn’t have it when I moved in, I did have it when I moved out, and somehow built it in Grayslake. Must have gone home and built it on weekends or something. One of the original construction pictures I have says that it was taken in February 2016. We’ll go with that.
I based the project on Jon Peter’s Sofa Table Bookcase plans with some minor tweaks.
This was one of my earliest projects. I was still figuring a lot out and was limited by the imprecision of the tools I had access to. As a result, the original completed bookcase was pretty subpar. It looked OK from a distance, but had a handful of awful issues I couldn’t live with:
- The top and trim were “Mahogany” purchased from a big box store, and I finished them with some sort of polyurethane that ended up feeling very plasticy like a bar top.
- The trim was attached horribly - there were awful gaps in the miters that I naively filled with wood putty, and it was attached using 16 gauge nails that were super obvious.
- The top was attached horribly - it didn’t sit flush because it was warped, and apparently I fixed this by shoving wood putty in the gap. The overhang was too small (just 1/4 in some places) and uneven.
- The paint felt cheap or like a primer, and was rough to the touch.
Furniture this flawed could not go on living in my house - it needed to either be scraped or renovated. In April 2020, I was looking for projects to do in my spare time during COVID quarantine, and opted to renovate it by completing the following steps:
- Rip off the old top and old trim.
- Build a new base - the old one was just too out of square to work with.
- Square up attachment surfaces using a hand plane to ensure everything could sit flush.
- Build new top and trim out of walnut, including a new piece of cove moulding to make the top look thicker.
- New paint job.
I’m quite happy with the result of the renovation. The bookcase is now one of the more handsome pieces of furniture in my house.
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