construction of the bookcase

The bookcase which was to be placed in the study area of the set was assigned to myself, Dan and Nuria. The original design as shown previously with a cardboard model, was to build a bookcase to put into the alcove of the room. However, to save time and wood we decided to make the alcove itself the bookcase. We began by constructing five shelves made from 12mm MDF. three shelves were used for the actual bookcase shelving. two were used for the top of the bookcase and the bottom of the shelving unit. at first we used small blocks to hold up the shelves at the sides and back. however this did not look right and we rectified it by putting braces onto the shelves themselves this both made the shelves stronger and hid the blocks that held them up.










once these were in place we made the front of the bookcase. this was a piece of 12mm MDF that we screwed onto blocks already placed in the wall. The doors were made from the same MDF however we used a jigsaw to cut out the middle, this left us a door frame that we screwed onto the shelves. as the bookcase is fake we decided that we would make fake doors and place books inside before inserting glass (acrylic) into the doors.









the bookcase was then painted and hand grained. for the drawers at the bottom of the unit we used 6mm MDF and used the overhead router to round the edges. these were then painted in the same way as the rest of the bookcase. the drawers were then nailed to the front of the bookcase and doorhandles put on. to finish the doors we put acrylic on the back of the opening. we ran into a couple of problems with this however. first of all we could not source the correct size of acrylic due to a company moving. because of this we had to add two small pieces of acrylic to the top and bottom of the two doors. we covered up the joins with beading that starts the lattice pattern. the other problem that we ran into was the adhesive that we used. at first we tried 'no more nails' but it didnt seem to stick very well or quick enough so we finally used a hot glue gun. we filled the bookcase with books and small knick-knacks the doors were then screwed onto the front of the bookcase and the lattice was finished. a coat of glaze was then painted onto the woodwork.