Sometimes when it comes to DIY all you need is a vision, confidence and a little naiveté. Or in my case, a lot of naiveté.
Last summer, a friend called me with the exact kind of project I was looking for:
Something creative, something handmade, something with wood, and bonus: I would be paid! The mission? Build a 3’ x 9’ floating shelving unit with a dozen or so cubbies for a Minneapolis coffee shop, Urban Bean.
I answered with a resounding yes, though I didn’t have the faintest idea how I was going to make it happen. But I’ve never met a project I haven’t figured out. So I met with the owner of Urban Bean, to get a better idea of what he had in mind. Then it was caution to the wind and I took my vision to paper.
The owner wanted the shelf close to the entrance of the coffee bar, which concerned me. Might not customers bump into it?
To minimize that potential issue I suggested a 7-inch depth, but Greg really wanted 9-inch. His goal was to fit one-pound bags of beans, three deep. I told him I wouldn’t go 9-inches without first prototyping.
My high tech proto included taping cardboard to the wall for a day – Greg and I agreed at 9”, the burden was acceptable.
Along with my cardboard proto, I showed the owner a simple box I had made using ½ thick wood from Home Depot (which I learned is the thinnest stock lumber available). The desired 5” x 5” coffee mug hugging cube at a 9” depth with ½” lumber looked…weird. It was a dark tube, not a shelf. So, custom lumber it had to be! Is custom lumber a thing? Oh man, I had more learnin’ to do. I reviewed the final plans with Greg and told him I’d get back to him with some sort of quote after I figured out where I’d find my custom lumber.
I visited two lumberyards in Minneapolis, with Keven in tow. I decided to work with Youngblood Lumber in North Minneapolis. The place was super cool:
They let us cut off a chunk of the poplar I was going to have milled down to ¾” thickness so I could bring it home and test the paint finish. I learned poplar is the best choice for work requiring a consistent professional grade painted finish. The lumber was ready from Youngblood in just a day.
I gave the owner a quote that estimated the project would take me 12 hours to complete. I was thinking 3 half days would be more than enough! Oh, how little I knew.
First step? Painting, and also my first mistake. After carefully sanding the pieces, I used a wet cloth to wipe off the sawdust before painting. I know now that using a wet cloth sort of “wakes up” the recently submissive wood grain and creates a terrible texture. I only realized this, of course, after my first coat of paint. So, back to the sander – I re-sanded everything and this time wiped things clean with a DRY cloth. This created the smooth surface I’d been aiming for; but not before using almost a gallon of fancy enamel paint. But who’s counting!
For the back of the cabinet, the plan was to cut the required shape from a ½” piece of plywood with a maple veneer on the outside. I borrowed my mom and stepdad Steve’s garage space (not to mention the endless consultative brain borrowing I needed from Steve).
This is where I learned my second important lesson, one that we have all heard before:
Measure twice, cut once. Or in my case, measure about 12 times before cutting anything.
Upon finishing the arduous effort of cutting the irregular shaped backer board I realized I had somehow cut the whole thing 10 inches too short.
Steve helped me brainstorm whether there was any hope of saving the piece and somehow inserting a 10” addition, but I finally just sucked it up, returned to Home Depot to purchase my second $80 piece of fancy plywood and started again.
So there was my first 8-hour Saturday and I’d only accomplished step 1. My 12-hour estimate was looking a bit shakey. Next, I needed to cut the edges. I started with the quad of shelves in the lowest corner.
The process for the rest of the shelving was crazy. First, I needed to keep straight between wood that was 9.5” deep and wood that was only 9”… an important half inch. The deeper pieces were reserved for the vertical edges where they’d need to cover the ½” backer board.
Mistake numero tres, I hadn’t planned for horizontal shelves that covered the edge of the backboard, but also sat atop the board. For those cases, I would start with a 9.5” piece and notch off ½” for the distance that was on top.
Naturally, this meant I had underestimated the amount of 9.5” boards I would need. Back to the lumberyard. Though I only needed one more piece of wood, I had to pay for the custom milling set up fees again, making my final chunk of wood a hefty $100.
The next big “learning moment” was when I realized I would have to stop relying on my drawing for the dimensions. In a perfect world, I could have cut all the wood exactly according to my drawing, every cut had the potential for tiny changes to the overall dimension. I had to measure everything on the piece itself rather than using my simple drawing. Being fluent in 1/8, 1/16, 5/8, 3/8, 15/16th- measurements is an art that I quickly embraced!
In addition to my new measuring skills, I learned to use a new tool – the hand router. I’m quite certain a professional carpenter would have some sort of wonderful routing table, but I only had access to Steve’s hand router – which meant that I need to set up (and take down and set up and take down and set up and take down…) a metal guide to create straight cuts at the correct spot.
Also, I had to cut any opposing boards at the same time. This dictated which cuts I made when.
Approximately 4 hours later, I finally had something that was starting to take shape:
The metal guide was not the only thing I had to set up and take down a thousand times. In order to make the measurements for the next shelf, I needed to clamp together the shelves I had already cut. I couldn’t actually screw anything together right away because so many pieces needed additional routing for shelves I hadn’t cut yet. So temporary clamping it was.
So I clamped and un-clamped each time I needed to create the next shelf. It was a rubber mallet, fighting, cursing, holding, clamping, crying fiasco, but I started to get the hang of it.
The finishing touches of the project happened in my dirty/dark garage at home. I installed the shelves with a combo of glue and screws. I screwed each shelf in from the back as well as to each other from the sides. Each screw first requiring a tiny pilot hole. Because of my tiny little 3/8”width shelves, driving these screws was no simple project. I solicited the unending patience of my husband, Keven, and mother, Caran, who both helped me endlessly as we attached the shelves. They held their hands on either side of the shelf I was driving into – if they felt anything they’d yell “STOP” and we’d back it out with the goal of not popping any of the 2.5” screws through the sides of the shelves. We had a few mistakes but like everything with this project – I got pretty good!
I finally had the whole thing assembled. It looked like a wreck. Things fit together well but there was no shortage of scrapes and gaps and imperfections. Nothing, however, a little spackle and major sanding action couldn’t fix.
Then, the final touch-up paint work and I had created quite the masterpiece.
I used a wood-burning tool for my trademark on the back.
So now that the shelfing unit was complete, I had to install it. Steve and Keven agreed to join me at the coffee shop to be the muscle. If you remember this thing was to “float” on the wall. I had previously measured out the studs to ensure we’d have enough to hold it solidly on the wall. If we did things correctly, there should be 3 studs that we could use.
Keven and Steve held the beast up while I screwed it to the wall. The plan was to spackle the screw holes at the end.
The owner was really excited about the shelf and kept wandering to the back of the shop to admire it from a distance. Before I left, we got to place the first few items on the shelf to really get a feel for the end product.
Weeks later I spotted the shelf in an Urban Bean Instagram post here and there:
It’s quite satisfying! When I sent him the invoice I included 36 unplanned hours as a “taking a risk on me discount”, just to be sure he didn’t tell all his friends about the steal of a deal Marge offers in shelf making. I don’t think I’d take on a project quite this involved again unless I had access to all the tools and space of a real carpenter. But it did serve to inflate my “I can do anything” DIY confidence, which gives Keven shivers as he worries what I might take on next.
