While I have always been interested in DIYs and carpentry. With the pandemic still around I decided to upscale from the tiny projects that I had been doing and make something of a larger size. I didn't have a lot of full sized wood but I did have a lot of planks remaining from my previous projects and I decided to upcycle those for my new project.
After searching through the web and brainstorming for a viable design. I finally decided upon a particular design which I could create using the materials that I was planning to upcycle.
After measuring the pieces, cutting them to the right sizes, planing and polishing the wood, the difficult task of using those pieces to materialise into my idea remained. The planning stage took the longest for me. I usually love working alone and I have found it to be productive for me in the case of my previous projects. However, this was the first time I was attempting something of this size and scale and I quickly realised that this project would be something that would require the work of at least two people because of the design.
Attaching the pieces to each other was a bit difficult as I had to find a way to stabilize the planks as I joined the planks. I tried joining the pieces in this way first and that way next and this is where I wasted much of my time. It was a tedious job but after the first few planks were set in place, the structure became more stable and it became easier to attach the rest of the pieces onto the bookshelf. I was happy because I thought that I'd have to keep manually stabilizing the pieces all the way through my project.
The design that I had planned for this bookshelf was a snaky frame attached to a long piece of plank as the backbone of the bookshelf. In my mind and drawings it looked pretty cool and I thought it would hopefully complement the location that I would decide to place it in. I had seen quite a few of such designed furniture on the web and they looked pretty awesome and interesting.
After I was done attaching all the pieces, I began using a rotor sander to polish and smoothen out the extra imperfections that had been left out during the initial sanding and planing process. Halfway into polishing, I realised that I should have worn a mask while doing this because of all the wood dust that was floating around. The wood dust was causing me to sneeze a lot and got me teary eyed. I had experienced wood dust floating around before but it wasn't much of a bother to me because my previous projects were smaller ones that didn't produce wood dust in this amount. But this time I was covered in wood dust and was looking pretty much like a Roman statue because of it. I have learned from this mistake and will be using a mask the next time I sand something of this scale. Or even better - use a mask for myself everytime I sand wood like this.
After a day's work of thinking, designing, cutting, planing, attaching and polishing, I was finally done with the project. By the looks of it I was pretty impressed by the end result and the way I had managed to get it look like the design that I had initially planned and thought about. A sense of pride now fills me because this is the first time I had attempted something like this. My bookshelf now waits to have it's finishing touches done on it. But that is the topic of another article. Hope you enjoyed reading about my journey in attempting my new project.