New bookcase scaled from original plan

About ten years ago I was feeling restless, primarily about work, and I decided that the best way to take my mind off of things was to get a project going. I find that when work starts to creep into my off hours, I respond by filling up my time so I don’t have a chance to think about it.

Donna and I wanted a nice bookcase for the home we were living in at the time so I thought I would draw up a plan and buy some wood. I generally don’t get too fussy about how I am going to build something until I have drawn it first — paying particular attention to the scale and proportion of the piece. Once I have it drawn, I start processing in my mind the best way to get it built. I usually have a good idea of how I will go about it and make little hand sketches along the way when I need to make sure critical dimensions and joinery will work. As I mentioned in my kitchen stove hood post, I sometimes go further with 3D modeling if I don’t want to take chances. The bookcase was pretty straight forward so I just worked from my initial 2D drawing.

I used Adobe Illustrator to create the 2D drawing you see below. I have a CAD (computer aided design) application that I use for home design but I really like Illustrator for things like this project. Why? I know how to use Illustrator from years of graphic design work and it also allows me to rapidly try different design possibilities more efficiently than my CAD program allows.

To get the scale right, I actually set my units to millimeters in Illustrator and draw as if they were inches. So, 4.5 millimeters equals 4.5 inches. Why not set the units to inches? Well, that would make my drawing extremely big on the virtual page and, in the end, all I really care about is accurate scale. Plus, millimeters seem to fit efficiently on the normal letter sized page in Illustrator for the size of the projects I build.

2D bookcase plan drawn in Adobe Illustrator

Once satisfied with the scale and proportions, I label all the key measurements, create a plan of attack, and start cutting wood. The piece in the photo below was built directly from my plan out of cherry veneers and solids. The veneers are over medium density fiberboard and can be ordered from most lumber stores. The fiberboard is heavy but is milled very precisely, which creates an ultra smooth surface when the factory veneers are applied. I find it quite fun to figure out how to build a strong piece of furniture while making it as light as possible. This piece was built in two pieces and then stacked in the room.

One of the toughest parts of this project was getting the finish to turn out right. Much of the piece is pre-stained before assembly. This means you have to keep track of what will be glued during assembly. If you stain where you expect to glue, the glue will not absorb into the connecting pieces, which generates a subpar bond. Also, cherry excretes oils that like to reject hand applied finish coatings. It was maddening to apply the cherry stain, especially to the solids, only to have streaks of it wipe off when hand applying the clear finish coat. After fighting with this phenomenon a bit, I went to spraying the final finish so the stain underneath would stay in place. Good old process engineering!

Original bookcase from 2D plan

OK, now for the fun part. When we moved into our current house four years ago, I framed-in a recess in our study to accept a custom built-in bookcase. Being satisfied with the overall design of the freestanding bookcase I built five years earlier, I reopened the old drawing file, simplified the design to go with the decor in the new place and simply scaled the drawing in Illustrator to fit the new framed opening. After scaling, I remeasured the millimeters, converted to inches, and viola! I was ready to build another bookcase. Since I was happy with the proportions of the original piece, I knew they would work if scaled to the larger opening. The photo at the top of the post is the finished built-in version of the bookcase. Note that I eliminated the credenza portion but the scale of everything is the same relative to the original piece. The finished piece is about 10 feet tall by 11 feet and some change wide. I will confess that I did not build the second bookcase. I have a good friend that is an amazing carpenter that built it because I was very busy at work. It was fun to see my design come to life without all the work of the original piece. It is amazing how what we learn in design applies to so many things. Accurate drawing, scale and proportion sound hauntingly familiar when approaching my painting projects. I am getting to feel that all creative endeavors are deliciously intertwined!

Kitchen Hood 3D Concept

No passion blog would be complete without a woodworking category. I have been wanting to post this for a while and since we have a wind driven blizzard going on outside, I thought I would highlight one of my favorite woodworking projects. About four years ago, Donna and I had the privilege of building our own place. We had bought the land several years earlier and finally got around to building on it.

When I was just out of high school and going to college, I worked at a sign shop here in town where I learned a bunch of woodworking skills from an extremely talented doer of all things. Well one thing led to another including building some furniture and ultimately a house. I searched far and wide for a kitchen hood to go with the house design. It was to be the crowning glory of the space and would be seen from practically all areas in the main living area.

The hoods I found were really expensive and did not fit the design of the kitchen including the the mechanical stove vent to my satisfaction. I knew the only way to get what I wanted was to design and build it myself. I started out by designing the kitchen layout in 3D to get a feel for the scale of the cabinets and the hood and how they would relate to the rest of the kitchen. The rendering below was the result of many hours of building models and texturing them to create a reasonably realistic visualization of the space. I know I am a nut and most would not do this but it was fun and it really appealed to my artistic and creative needs at the time.

Visualizing the kitchen in 3D

Being happy with the pre-visualization, I created a full size paper template of the front and sides of the upper drywalled portion of the hood to make sure I would have the right clearances for the stainless-steel powered vent and its eight inch exhaust pipe to fit inside. I then took the paper template and used it as a reference to frame together the bones of the hood in my shop. Below is what I ended up with.

Kitchen hood framing complete

The nifty thing about this design was that once the house framing was complete, all I had to do was take this to the site, level it, and nail it to the kitchen wall framing. Below is what it looked like installed at the house.

Kitchen hood installed waiting for drywall

Once the drywall was complete, I installed the mechanical unit and began measuring for the woodwork trim build that would pull it all together. As shown at the top of the post, I built a 3D model to exact measurements and actually assembled the trim in a virtual environment before cutting any wood. This made the build very stress free and the ultimate installation a breeze.

Getting ready to measure for trim

Below is a picture of the 3D model of the hood and the woodwork under construction in my shop.

3D model of kitchen hood build

Kitchen hood assembly with some pre-staining

OK, just about there for the big reveal! In the end, it all turned out great! I love tapping all areas of creativity to get things done. Taking something from idea to concept and to the ultimate goal is incredibly exciting to me. It is truly a blessing to have a creative drive and I hope anyone that reads this digs deep to find it and is able to experience the true joy of its pursuit. Below is the final picture after a ton of additional finish work.

The finished kitchen hood project!