Planning to Build a Bookcase

Series Summary

Furniture serves many important, essential functions for people the world over. In the last few thousand years, chairs, beds, desks, and tables have provided places to sit, eat, talk, work, gather, or sleep. Many people will spend more than a third of their lives in, at, or on furniture. It comes as no surprise, then, that humans have a unique relationship with this group of items they spend so much time around. In some ways, furniture has become a reflection of personality. When choosing furniture for their homes or offices, people are known to concentrate on design, giving it equal or greater weight than function and stability. Many people pass furniture items down from one generation to the next, keeping the item as a family heirloom.

When it comes to making your own furniture, the process can seem overwhelming. However, in this free video series, an artist and woodworker will break down the steps of such a process by showing you how to build a bookshelf. You'll learn what lumber and tools you'll need, how to sand the wood, and how to plan where screws will sit. You'll also learn how to connect the shelves, how to insert kick plates, fill in cracks, and how to plug the screw holes. With these tips and techniques, you'll be able to save money and gain pride by building your own bookshelf at home.

Video Transcript

"Hi, good afternoon. This afternoon we're going to work on making a book case a very simple pine book case that looks beautiful but it does its job and it's pretty cheap to make. Our book case is going to be 36 inches high, 27 inches wide and 11 inches deep. So the first thing we have to do is select some lumber to make it with. I'm going to use ponderosa pine that I bought at my local home store. This board is 8' long and 11 3/8" or so wide. Since these boards, they call them 12" wide but they're only a little over a 11 and they vary in width from board to board. So we are going to have to make sure that all the boards in our book case are the same width. We are going to rip them all to the closest width which is 11 inches."