The Shelving Unit

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my tasks was to make a shelving unit that will store all of our DVDs and CDs. Currently, we have way too many for a conventional storage system, and we reused a bookshelf from the office to suffice while this one was built. Using this bookshelf led to the general knowledge of about how big to make the shelving unit, which was helpful.

After much debate, we settled on a general size and "design" (simpler the better, as I hadn't worked with wood in many years), and off I went to get wood and begin.


Boards purchased, laid out, and ready for sanding.

Then came the inevitable sanding. Luckily, I have a power sander my father got me a long ways back, which is a good size, works well, and for which I had a bunch of existing sanding paper in the grits that I needed.


First pass at sanding boards.

This is me during the sanding phase.


Sorry, ladies, but I'm already spoken for!

Once the initial sanding was done, I did a dry-fit of the boards and the design to see if there were any immediate gotchas that were going to need resolving.


A dry run of the boards and design.

Then it was back to more sanding, work on the gotchas, and making the whole thing as square as I could given my limited means. Once that was done, I moved on to what I thought was going to be a dry-fit with hardware, but turned out to be the permanent fitting.


Dry-fit on the floor and upright after screwing it all together.

It turns out that some of the boards were a bit more warped when put together than they appeared when looked at as separate boards. Because of this, I didn't think I could unscrew the unit, stain and varnish it, and put it back together again. I felt it was necessary, in order to complete the project, to keep this dry-fit together and go for the staining and the varnishing as a whole unit.

(Pictures of staining missing -- they are on the internal memory card for the camera and I can't find the wire needed to move them off onto my PC.)

After getting the entire shelving unit stained, it was on to the varnish/polyurethane and final sanding phase of the project.


Caught in the act of sanding.

The finished product after sanding, staining, polyurethane-ing, sanding, reattaching the backer boards, and cleaning/dusting.


No matter what angle I put it at, or how I used the flash, I got sun spots in the picture. Try to ignore them.

Finally, the end product in the room, on the wall, with movies.


Looks pretty good, doesn't it?

It turned out not to have as much free space left on it as I was hoping, but we still have a full shelf+ to expand, and each shelf holds nearly 50 regularly-sized DVDs. Unfortunately, it isn't big enough to hold all of our CDs as well as the DVDs. I guess I miss-judged the quantity of movies we had as a couple! But it does well for the DVDs and does allow for quite a bit of expansion, so it works, looks decent, and fits in the space.

Now, on to the next project....