Steve's new bookshelf

- written by Steve


I have this awesome little office in our new house, and it's pretty perfect for what I need. Big windows, teddy bear ceiling fan, white board wall, door to nowhere. Everything the work-from-home man needs. While I love the teddy bear ceiling fan, we did want to do something about that door to nowhere. Fortunately, Amy, being the genius that she is came up with her brilliant idea (wording included for legal reasons) that we turn that space into a "built-in bookshelf".

Pretty awesome eh? See how it looks like the shelves are actually sliced into the door frame? Well they're not. Stop being so ridiculous!

The first step to any good built-in doorway bookshelf is to take off the door.

Yup, that's the doorway that leads straight to a wall. It was actually a good move by whichever of the previous owners decided to do this. On the other side of that wall is our bedroom, and that closet space was used to make the master bedroom closet much bigger. While that's all great, this space needed to be dealt with.

Since there used to be a door attached to that frame, I had to fill in the various door-related holes. Of course, they were right on the edge, making this particularly tricky to get shaped properly, but I think I did ok.

With a couple coats of paint, the patch jobs were pretty hard to find. Once my arm pain was gone from all the pats on the back I gave myself, I painted the shelves.

No, we didn't just magically get these perfectly cut shelves to fit our needs. Since we wanted the shelves to look built in, we wanted them to be wider than the door frame. To avoid actually cutting into the door frame and risk the house falling down on us, we opted for the illusion of the shelves being a bit inside the walls. After checking and rechecking the measurements to make sure they were right, we took them to Poppa to cut, since we didn't have anything sharper than a steak knife (although they're pretty good steak knives).

The shelves were originally black, and at the last second, we decided to go with white, so I got to painting them with multiple coats. While I was at it, I thought I might try to put the trim from inside the door frame to good use.

By this time, I had invested in a saw, so I cut the pieces to be supports for the shelves and painted them up.

There are 2 things to note in the picture above.

1. My hands were pretty dirty at this point, so there are smudges everywhere.

2. There are some pretty noticeable chunks missing from spots around the door frame.

Well, I figured I'd do a clean up at the end, so easily disregarded the fingerprints. :) As far as those chunks are concerned, that's the secret to the "built-in" look. When it's all done, those little chips will make it look like the shelves are slid right into the wall. You'll see...

After a lot of hammering and chiseling, the frame was ready for shelves. See those little pieces of wood that were going to be used as the back supports for the shelves? Well, turns out they suck, and all had to come out. Fortunately one of the reason they sucked is because they didn't stay in very well, so it was pretty easy to pop them all out. We had already bought brackets, so I just ended up using those.

There you have it! See how it looks like the shelves cut into the door frame? Sneaky eh? Now all I need to do is buy a whole bunch of crap I don't need, and load up the shelves with it!