A Major Book Migration

 

DW retired this year after 35 years of teaching mostly fourth and fifth graders. During that time she accumulated a sizable library in her classroom. Some inherited from her mom- also a teacher, some donated to her classroom from former students and their parents, but most purchased by her over the years. She originally intended to leave them to her successors who are good friends. The pandemic changed those plans. With her former team reassigned or laid off and with classroom learning on hold, we did not want the fate of these books left to the SK school district bureaucracy. Neither dropping them off at GoodWill or other donation sites do justice to the memories these books held and how important they were to DW. Thus her books came home with us rather than the collection face an uncertain future.

Redistributing these books to kids to continue promoting reading is our hope and wish as our lives have been richer in many ways because as kids we both had books in our homes. But how to store 2000 books while slowly having them find new homes w/o the house starting to look like a Hoarders episode?

The above is our spare room- of sorts. It was our guest room, but with the pandemic, not much need for that purpose- recently or for the foreseeable future. It also serves as a sewing room and had room for a bookcase. The challenge was to maximize shelf space while minimizing the footprint. Since most of the books needing a home were less than 7 inches wide, a floor to ceiling shallow bookcase was the solution. 

As no such bookcase was available and distant approximations were either made of MDF and of disposable quality or of solid wood and very expensive, the best option was DIY. One benefit of having owned Ikea bookcases is that while I hate particle board, their design and assembly approach is very functional and their cross dowel and connector bolt construction has worked well on other projects. 

The most practical way to make a 72” wide by 90” tall and 7.25” deep bookcase with 8 shelves is in effect as knockdown furniture- an Ikea Billy case but with solid hardwood sides and plywood/hardwood shelves.

I went against adjustable shelves in favor of fixed height shelves for rigidity as that allowed the use of festool loose tenons for knockdown assembly/disassembly.

This bookcase build was notable for a number of challenges that- thanks for the evolution of my shop over the past several years- could be accomplished with the resources at hand.

The number and variety of clamps needed to do the glue-ups proved the old woodworkers rule that one can never have too many clamps.

Bessey clamps can be joined together to make 100” long clamps- a  feature that’s come in handy in past projects and now in this one for the side panels.

Then cutting plywood and hardwood in 6 ft long lengths for the shelves, top and bottom panels in a manner that they were all the exact same length was made possible with my moveable workbenches.

Another challenge solved with mobile work benches and machines was the holes needed for the  cross dowels.

Here is a view of the side panels with the Ikea style cross dowel assembly used for the bottom and top shelves with the other shelves held with  Festool loose tenons. Thus the bookcase can be disassembled and more easily relocated if needed.

The bookcase was assembled in the room and presto- there’s storage for +/-1000 kid’s books. BUT,

not enough for all the books shown on the top photo plus probably another 1000 books in books in our basement.

So the leftover books were boxed and will be stored in the basement area. 

Here is the children's book section/guest bedroom/sewing room (the sewing machines against the wall not pictured)

The next step in the redistribution process is a Free Little Library for our home's front yard and another one for my clinic.