I Did It Myshelf

When we moved into our house we managed to get most of the main living areas organized pretty quickly, but the living room had overflowing boxes for a month or two. And some of the biggest thorns in my side were the DVDs which were in boxes, but were also in use, and so managed to get stacked on any surface, or scattered in a pile on the floor around their packing boxes. This would never do! We didn't have a shelf to put them on  so I came up with this ingenious solution:

By setting the boxes up on end, and cutting off the short flaps I could use them as a beautiful—although temporary—set of shelves for the DVDs. And all of our movies fit perfectly into these shelves too!

This "temporary" fix lasted almost a year. My lovely, leaning shelf of movies did its job and didn't receive a ton of thought throughout that year. But one day I was looking at it and I had another ingenious idea. See, when we bought the house there was a dresser that was actually built right into a bedroom.

We didn't want it there, so we tore it out. But, for some reason, although the rest of it was destroyed, we kept the three drawers in the shed.

So I was looking at the DVD "shelf" and I thought, I bet I could make shelves from those old drawers! And the more I thought about it, the more this seemed like a fantastically great idea. So I brought the drawers back into the house to determine if it would be as swell as I was thinking it would.

Well! This looked promising.

So I had Bruce help me start chopping them up. I didn't want to rebuild them, just add some shelves inside them. But I didn't want a center beam, either. So we cut the faces off of them—using a circular saw, which may not have been the easiest, most accurate way of doing the job, but that's what we had.

There I am, marking one of the many little nit-picky cuts we had to make to take the front of the drawer off.

And then Bruce got a new job, and wasn't available to help me with this project any more. And I was trying to manage the house pretty much by myself, and I decided that I had to revamp my bathroom, and I had to take Ryan mission shopping in Salt Lake, and I was getting ready to bring Brandon home, and I was working on another project for a friend...  So the shelves got put on hold for a little while. But I started in on them again a couple weeks ago, and I finished them just days before we picked up Brandon!

At first I was just going to find some way of connecting the two drawers from the back, but as I was searching for scrap wood that might be big enough to make the shelves I found some drawer-fronts that Brandon had made in his high school woodworking class, that were the wrong size for his project. They were made of wormy maple, and they were lovely, with nice routed edges; I thought one of them would make a nice top for the whole shelf. So I glued the ends of the two drawers to the back of one drawer-face. Unfortunately the drawers twisted just a little as I was setting them in place and the glue set up super fast, so I couldn't straighten them out. Darn! But it was just a tiny bit twisted, so I figured I could work with it. It would just add to the homemade, recycled charm of the piece, right?

The next step was to fill in the gap in the back. For this I had Kaylie, who took woodworking herself last trimester, cut and bring me a board to glue into the back of the shelf.

Then, should I leave the gap in the back open, thus showing the charm of my shelves made of recycled, forty-year-old, plywood drawers? Or should I fill in the gap? I opted for the filled-in, slightly less redneck look. A piece from the bottom of the third drawer, some wood glue, and some wood filler would do the trick.

I added a little 1/2-inch molding beneath the wormy maple top, which made it look nicely finished. The dashed red line shows where the top meets with the molding. (I also put a piece of 1 1/4-inch molding around the bottom, to hide all the patchwork down there.)

After lots of measuring, I got the shelves glued into place...and then added some nails for good measure. I had my doubts about those shelves, but you can see for yourself that they are fairly level. At least from one side to the other; they may or may not tilt forward or backward...but just a tiny bit.

And then, sanding. And sanding, and sanding. Well, I had to do a lot of sanding throughout the project, not just at the end. I mean, after all, I was using 40-year-old, dried-up, plywood drawers—and then there was all the wood-filler I used.  Throughout the project I probably spent about six or seven hours just sanding this thing. In spite of the mask I wore, I breathed in so much sawdust that, by the end, the inside of my nose seemed to be made of particle board. (Ew.)

ready to varnish the top

I made use of some of the leftover "Parchment White" paint from the bathroom to do the main body of the shelves. The top is stained and varnished. I did do all the painting, staining and varnishing inside the house; it was too cold in the garage for anything to cure properly. Growing up with a mom who did oil paintings, and a dad and brothers who did woodworking, I actually like the smell of wood-stain and varnish. Not that I would breathe it in like a flower scent, but the smell of it in the house doesn't bother me.

And now, for the big reveal:

Before (just in case you forgot)

and After
(Feel free to "ooh" and "ahh.")

So, despite what you'd learn if you took a level and a square to all bits of this shelf, and despite it being held together with glue and wood-filler, I do believe my new DVD shelf is still less redneck than its predecessor. In fact, I believe it's quite nice, and I'm quite pleased with it. :-)