Background

My good friends recently welcomed their first baby and were kind enough to trust me with building a pair of bookcases for the new nursery. The baby's room is on the second floor and has crawl space storage on opposite walls that is accessible by insulated doors, and they wanted those doors to become bookcases. This meant the bookcases would also need to be sealed to protect the room from the temperature swings of a coastal Rhode Island attic., while still being removable in case they needed to access the crawlspace. A fun challenge!

Getting To Work

Because these bookshelves were going to be painted white, I started by acquiring some high quality 3/4" birch plywood and edge banding from the good folks at Medway Lumber. Initially, we discussed making the shelves adjustable by using shelf pins, but ultimately my friends wanted to have the shelves permanently affixed so they could hold all the hardcover baby books they were about to receive. I cut a 1/4" deep dado into the sides of each bookcase that the shelves would sit in, which provided additional strength and rigidity. The shelves were glued and screwed into place and all exposed edges were edge-banded. They happened to have a pile of nickel gap shiplap in their basement from a recent project that they wanted to incorporate, so I used that as a backer for the bookcases instead of the usual 1/4" plywood, which made assembly faster and gave the bookcases some extra character. Next I sprayed them with a few coats of cabinet-grade white paint and sealed all of the gaps around the outside with 4-season caulking.

For the installation itself we decided it would be best to completely install the first bookcase before starting on the second in order to minimize the amount of time the room was open to the crawlspace. I began by removing the trim, old doors and hardware, and door jamb. We didn't want space under the bookcase so the door jamb was replaced with a piece of wood that was flush with the flooring - I had to put another piece of wood on the inside of the opening to stop the bookcases from tipping when moving them into place. In order to make these 'removeable' I installed each bookcase using threaded inserts and brass bolts so they wouldn't have to worry about screws stripping out of wood if they had to access the crawl space multiple times. There was a slight issue with the second bookcase hitting a ceiling joist, so I had to notch out a small piece of the back to accommodate - don't cut through the shiplap, Peter!! Luckily it worked out and fit snugly into place after being notched.

To finish off the install, I sealed the edges of each bookcase by stuffing foam backing rod into the small gaps on each side and built some new trim out of 3.5" clamshell casing to match the baseboard trim. Then a quick round of touch-up painting and these bookcases were ready to go! 

The Result

The bookcases turned out great, they added a lot of needed functionality, and I got to spend time with some awesome people while I worked. It doesn't get much better than that! This project was fun to work on from start to finish, made even more special that it's for people who are very dear to me, for something so dear to them. Setting up a new baby's nursery is an exciting time in a new parents journey, and I am honored that I've played a small role in that process for Andrew and Jen.