Our living room has kind of a strange layout, and we’ve experimented with various places to put the TV. We started with the large entertainment center we had in our apartment, but it was quite deep, and we wanted more floor space. We found a china hutch on the curb, and spray painted it gold for a shabby-chic look (previous posts), but we lost the storage space. The final solution? Make a custom piece, of course.
My inspiration was seeing antique doors used as headboards and under glass as desks. I thought that it would be really interesting to make one into a bookshelf. So we went to our favorite store, Community Forklift, to look for supplies. We picked out one elderly 6-panel entry door, found three lengths of 6″ tongue-and-groove pine planking, and a few old Ikea shelves. We came home feeling like we’d robbed a hardware store, because we probably got the greatest deal in the world.
Step 1: Measure, measure, measure. Then cut, cut, cut. I ripped the door down the middle (promting the purchase of a table saw, of course) and cut the tongue and groove down to size. I then figured out where all the shelves needed to go, and cut a notch into the side of the door for the ends to fit in. Without a dado blade, it was necessary to do it using a circular saw and chisel out the junk left between cuts.
Step 2: Glue the shelf parts together and lay-out to see how it all fits.
Step 3: glue together – I had to get pipe clamps and two really long pipes to get the shelves clamped.
