These are the remains of a desk hutch that I had bought from the “House of Denmark” store years ago. It was a nice hutch with teak veneer, but was no longer useful with my modern 24 inch flat panel monitor.
I decided to try and make a bookcase from these pieces.
I didn’t spend much time designing the bookcase. I just wanted to maximize the use of available material and minimize waste. This is the quick pencil sketch I did.
The trickyest part was the backer for the bookcase. The hutch used a partial backer board. It wasn’t going to be big enough for my bookcase. So I ripped it into thirds on the tablesaw and then resawed them on the bandsaw. Then I could plane the strips to equal thickness (yes you can plane particle board) and glue them to a single sheet of plywood. This gave me a large continuous sheet of plywood with teak veneer covering one side.
Here is the result after much thought and effort. To make the boards the correct length took extra effort because I had to trim the endcap veneers with the tablesaw, crosscut to length and then glue the endcap back on.
The result is much better than any of the $50 particle board bookcases I found in stores. I was surprised at how hard it was to find a SOLID, non-saging, non-particle board bookshelf.
it is every nice, it is always nice to find new purpose for old things.
I want to make a nice and sturdy bookshelf out of old scrap woods but don’t know what equipment I need…..but one thing I know, I need a router for all of the main pieces to have some kind of support from other pcs. aside screws and staples.
if you don’t mind, could you help guid me with that? if you could, it would be deeply appreciated.
thank you very much in advance, Sandra
As you can see my design is simple and works well because of 2 important elements.
1. the outer frame is made from thicker pieces of wood.
2. 1/8″ thin sheet of material nailed to the back of the bookcase creates stability.
The shelf pieces are removable and resting on shelf supports. The supports are just thin strips of wood that are screwed/glued into place.
The same strips of wood are used to screw/glue anchor the corners of the outer frame because I wanted to hide any screws.