When we bought this house I knew that the Mission style wainscoting was going to have to go. It made the walls completely unusable. After almost five years things were starting to pile up. It was time for a renovation.
The wainscoting was glued to the walls. After removing it I had to patch the drywall and clean all the caulk off of the walls. Then I had to skim coat the wall that would remain exposed.
I have a lot of books so I knew I needed some bookshelves, but we also, badly, needed drawers for storage. The wall is 11′ 7″ long. After sketching about 20 different versions I settled on this design.
The drawer carcase construction is all poplar. The bank of drawers is 36″ high and the drawers are 18″ deep and all dovetailed. The bookcase carcase’s are ¾” birch plywood and the fascia is all poplar. The top is made from four Cherry boards and the knobs are Cherry as well. The Cherry is all finished naturally with a satin varnish.
The interior of the bookcases are illuminated with LED rope lighting. There is an outlet at the bottom of each bookcase and a switch for the lights on the right hand side. The space at the top of the bookcase is for three 4-foot T-8 units with daylight bulbs to provide indirect lighting to the room.
The top two rows of drawers have soft-close drawer slides and the bottom row has heavy-duty slides for the hanging file drawers.
After the built-in was complete I installed the new baseboards and chair rail.
The paint colors were chosen from the Benjamin Moore Historic palette based on the colors I saw in James Madison’s office during my visit to Montpelier.
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Things are piling up! Time for a renovation.
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12' straight, clear, 8" wide Cherry boards are not easy to come by and even more difficult to work with in a small home shop!
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I attached the bookcases to the wall with 2x4 french cleats to leave enough room behind for the electrical boxes for the outlets. Here you can see some of the skim coated wall and what it looked like after the old wainscoting was removed.
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Here's an evening shot after the lighting was installed. It's actually much brighter than it appears in this picture. It's plenty to light the room nicely at night with indirect lighting. I ran additional wiring to the top of the bookcases. That way if I want to install more indirect lighting it's easy to do.
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All done! Now comes to hard part - moving all the stuff that's going into these drawers and on these shelves. The next project is to build a nice desk.
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That's an amazing amount of space that just one cupboard created man! All you need to do now is find the time for moving in all your stuff into the shelves haha!
Do you have plans that you can share with me?
Thank you
Tom