The one with the... Built in Bookcase

When we bought the house earlier this year, one of the things we knew we wanted to do was to construct built-in bookcase in the living room.  Although neither of us own a lot of books (thanks to major downsizing a year and a half ago while living in a 520 sq ft studio), nor do either of us have any carpentry skillz, we thought that a built in bookcase would look nice along the far wall of the living room to hold books, for storage, and decor.  We've also admired the nice clean look of built-ins at other people's homes. 

Since we always love a home improvement DIY challenge, we decided to take this on ourselves.  The first thing we did was to do a quick Google search of "Built in Bookcase."  Of course we found a lot of Bob Villa, eHow, and other DIY websites that make it look 100 times easier than it really is to build something like this.  Amist all the websites, we found a great site that gave us the needed inspiration and confidence that we could actually pull this off!  This guy used pre-fabricated cabinets from Home Depot and pre-drilled melamine particle boards to creat his built ins.  The site also sells his step by step instructions, but since we wanted to use real wood instead of particle board, we decided to build it from scratch ourselves. 

Dave began by using his mad computer skillz to design the bookshelf in Google SketchUp, free a user friendly 3D CAD modeling program developed by Google for architects, civil engineers, filmmakers, game developers, and related professionals.  Dave really got good at using Google SketchUp...to the point where he was sketching the exact molding that we wanted and had the dimensions down to a T.  There was also a minor challenge with relocating an air vent that was originally in the side wall and would have been covered by the bookcase. 

Here is the bookcase design in Google SketchUp:

Now that we know what we want it to look like, we had to start getting supplies.  We found the prefabricated unfinished oak cabinets at Home Depot (HD) -- they are just standard 36 inch upper cabinets that you'd put up in your kitchen.  Since our local HD did not have the three that we needed, we trekked to one other HD to secure all three.  Then there is the wood... we quickly realized that the HD lumber supply was just not going to work, nor did they have the ability to cut the large pieces of wood (8 feet) that was needed for the bookshelf.  After some calls, we found Fisher Lumber in Rockville, only a few miles from us.  The folks at Fisher were super helpful and they even referred us to a guy who has his own mill and all the tools necessary to cut the large sheets of plywood for us.  The mill guy is also a carpenter, so he gave us tips and warnings (i.e. our walls are probably not 90 degree angles since the house has probably shifted in the past 30 yeas).  Dave drew out the exact dimensions needed, purchased the lumber, and the mill guy took care of the rest! 

This is all the wood that was delivered to our house one Saturday morning:

The morning after the wood was delivered, I (Julia) left for a girl's weeklong cruise in the Southern Caribbean.  During this 7 day period, Dave decided he wanted to surprise me by building the whole bookshelf by himself!  The whole time he told me he was going to just chillax at home, play video games, and hang out with friends.  When I got home after 7 days of relaxing, ziplining, kayaking, swimming, snorkeling, and eating... Dave surprised me with this:

I could not believe that he did all of that by himself in only 7 days!  I was super suprised and amazed at what he had accomplished.  Believe it or not, we were only about 75% done at this point and we had no idea how difficult and time consuming the remaining 25% would be.  There was priming, painting 2 coats of high-gloss latex paint, 2 coats of gloss protective finish, cutting and attaching moulding, installing the vent cover, etc.  3 weeks later... (including one weekend lost due to the fence blowing down) we had our finished bookcase: 

TADA!!!!!

Click HERE to see the detailed step by step pictures and desriptions of how this all came together (pardon the spelling mistakes - the photo comments were created very late at night).  We are happy about how it came out, and I am really proud of Dave for all the hard work he's done.  It makes us smile every time we see it and having a finished product that we can say "we build that" makes it worth all those long days and nights.