Office Bookcase

With the completion of the Printer Stand, a bit of space has been cleared up on the floor of my office. Since I’ve got some extra room, I figured I might be able to put it to good use.

I’ve got a bunch of my old IT books, woodworking books, and other old books my dad gave me a long time ago (home improvement stuff, mostly) that are sitting on a bookcase in Lisa’s office. They are taking away space from her, not to mention they are much further away than I would prefer if I need to look something up while at my desk.

I don’t need a very big bookcase to house all of these books, so here is what I came up with as a solution.

The glass looks strange because this is the only thing Sketchup has to offer…safety glass.

I opted for doors with acrylic panels as I don’t want all of my books, or anything else I may store on the bookcase, to accumulate a ton of dust.

Again, as was the case with all previous office projects, changes had to be made when it comes to the doors (overlay vs. inset). While making that simple change, I decided to get rid of the middle door rails which made for four separate acrylic panels. I didn’t think those rails were necessary, and they fell in the middle of a shelf which would obstruct the view of books on said shelf.

I also thought about having the shelves be adjustable, but in all of my years in having adjustable shelves on bookcases, nearly every time the shelves would stay in one fixed position anyway, so why bother. It’s just an additional step and more work for nothing.

I didn’t bother adding the acrylic panels in the new drawing. They will be there in the finished project.

Overall, the bookcase will be roughly 48” high, about 36” wide, and a little over 13” deep. The depth and the spacing of the shelves was dictated by the largest books that I plan to shelve inside. These are actually some large binders from my dad with the home improvement stuff I mentioned previously.

The carcass was constructed just as before, with dadoes and stretchers secured with pocket screws. A thin 1/4” panel is, again, used to give the whole thing some rigidity. Iron-on edge banding was again used on any exposed plywood parts.

I had a small gaffe when I ran the dadoes for the bottom shelf. The TOP of the bottom shelf is supposed to be at 3-1/2”. When I set the fence on the table saw, I measured from the wrong side of the dado stack, and the dado wound up with the BOTTOM of the shelf being at 3-1/2” instead.

To fix the little mistake, I first had to plow out the dado at the correct measurement. This left me with a slot twice as wide as normal.

My slight miscalculation yielded this double-width dado.

Next I took a piece of scrap walnut plywood and milled it to the correct width and thickness.

The grain pattern and color don’t quite match, but it won’t be too noticeable in the finished piece.

Once I got the filler strips fitting properly (yes, I did this to BOTH sides of the bookcase), I glued them in place and clamped them overnight using the appropriate methods.

You can’t beat a pair of routers when it comes to clamping.

The results were alright, I guess. I couldn’t find any other pieces of walnut plywood with a similar color, at least not with the grain running in the correct direction. I had plenty of that shade with the grain running perpendicular to the rest of the sides, but that would have likely looked even worse.

Between the doors and the books/binders that will sit on the bottom shelf, my repair will hardly ever be seen.

I used the same chamfered profile on the base trim as with all of the other office furniture (gotta have matching things, of course).

The doors are more of the shaker-style, however I opted to assemble them a bit differently. The doors on the Printer Stand were glued together with regular yellow wood glue on the rails and stiles (the panels float in a groove). Since I’ve got an acrylic panel in use here, I opted to use hide glue instead. This allows me a little more working time (not that it’s needed with these types of doors) and the glue enables me to disassemble the doors should the acrylic become damaged in the future.

With the addition of the hard maple top, and more Walrus Oil Furniture Butter, this project was just about the easiest of them all.

In the end, I wasn’t that thrilled with the way the doors came out. Because of the acrylic panels, I decided to apply finish to all of the rails and stiles prior to assembly, which made for a difficult glue-up for me. Not to mention that I didn’t do a great job of sanding the doors either. My mistakes aren’t really noticeable to the untrained eye, but it still bugs me. I very well plan to remake the doors in the future, but for now they will be fine.

The last item to make will be the Office Storage Cabinet.