Blue Scream of Jeff: May 2018

Monday, May 28, 2018

Adventures in Woodworking: The Build Begins!

For most people Memorial Day Weekend marks the beginning of summertime cook-outs, beach vacations and long-lazy days lounging by the pool.

For me it marks the official opening of my woodworking shop and start of a project or two destined to take me all summer to complete.

This year, that project is a long-awaited series of built-in cabinets and bookshelves which will eventually surround the new big-screen TV I wrote about getting last November.

I’ve been talking about building this since we moved in 20 years ago, and now that we finally got that shiny, new, big flat-screen TV, and re-arranged our living room, I’ve run out of excuses to put it off. So now that I’m finally getting around to this long-awaited project, I’d thought I should document its construction. At first I thought about filming it, like the way my favorite Youtube woodworkers do. But my medium has never really been film. It’s always been the written word and trying to break into video production with such a large project was not realistic. I might do it someday, but for now I thought I’d just document my project here with a few pictures and captions.

THE CONCEPT:

My house is a bi-level home with what are called knee-walls on the lower level. These are short walls built on top of a concrete foundation wall. The concrete portion juts into the room more than the upper section forming an odd, shallow shelf along the length of the wall, usually at the three-foot mark. It looks odd and makes the room feel more like a basement than a family room. So my plan was to hide the ledge by turning it into a series of shallow cabinets. Then on top of those cabinets I planned to build bookshelves making the entire wall look like a built-in breakfront. There will be an empty section in the middle of the bookshelves where the flat screen TV will hang.

The first thing I did was measure the walls in my living room to get an idea how large an area I had to work with. It was quite big, almost 12 feet long and just under 8 feet tall. Then like all good geeks do, it was off to the computer to draw up a set of plans.

And not just any plans.

I spent a weekend or two refining my ideas to until I came up with a three-dimensional model in Sketchup that you can see above. It may look complicated, but this project really calls for nothing more than building a series of boxes at different sizes and connecting them.

Then, just because I could, I decided to take a quick cellphone picture of the area these shelves will occupy and though the magic of Photoshop merged the plan with the picture to give me an idea of what they’d look like in place. You can see that at right.

THE BUILD BEGINS:

With the plan in place, and after hemming and hawing over the type of plywood to use for the two base cabinets (they will be covered by solid cherry doors), I made my way to the big box store to pickup the material. The parts from both cabinets came from a sheet and a half of 3/4” birch plywood with the backs coming from a sheet of 1/4” plywood.

Here you can see me loading the material into my new car. It’s amazing what you can fit into a hatchback!

Then it was back to the shop to start breaking the material down to its individual parts:

Here are all the individual parts for both cabinets which were cut from the pieces you saw me load into my car: two tops and bottoms, four sides, two backs and four shelves.

Okay, I kind of cheated here. I had some extra plywood at home and cut them into 3 ½” strips to form the bases each cabinet will sit on.

Here’s one of the cabinets dry-fitted together. If you look closely, you can see the rabbet running around the edges of each piece for the back. The shelves are not permanent. There will be holes along each side so I can adjust them. They were just placed in there to verify I had cut to the correct size.

Before assembly, I decided it would be easier to stain each part lying flat on my workbench rather than trying to stain parts that were standing vertically or hanging down and would avoid finish either not getting all the way into corners or pooling there.

The problem with doing things this way, is that there were so many parts, that it took up BOTH bays of my garage workshop for a week. Mrs. BlueScream wasn’t really happy about that as she has this odd idea that garages are for parking cars in and NOT for workshops. Silly, Mrs. BlueScream…..

With the parts finally stained and sealed with three-coats of polyurethane, I was finally able to start gluing the cabinets together and staining the shelves.

Next month, I hope to have the center stereo equipment cabinet together and in place in the house. Then I’ll be able to start on the face frames and doors. I’ll keep you updated!