Custom-made wall-hung bookshelf

Last time on La Casa de Crafts, we were cutting lots of boards. We’ve finally turned those boards (which we purchased almost 2 years ago!) into a custom-made, wall-hung bookshelf.

For the almost-3-years that we’ve lived here, this entire wall above our couch has been empty. We have 9′ ceilings in the living room, so it seems particularly bare. We dreamed up this large (but not too heavy) bookshelf two summers ago and purchased the wood, only to realize that our scroll saw was not good for cutting straight lines. So we procrastinated for a couple of years, until we got a circular saw for Christmas this year. After cutting all the boards to size, we screwed in a lot of brackets:

And built two narrow shelves like this, each 12″ wide:

We screwed a 6′ board across the top of the two narrow shelves, then attached more brackets to the bookshelf, and screwed those into the studs. We only broke one screw in the process (pictured below, actually).

Then we spent an hour running around the apartment, collecting books and other random odds and ends to put on the shelves.

The finishing touch was hanging a Joan Miró print that my brother had gotten me years ago. The goal is to make this a rotating display, and swap out the books and art every now and then. The final step was rearranging all our other bookshelves, which somehow don’t seem to be any emptier.

A few technical details: this was constructed with 1″x8″ pine boards. Each narrow shelf is 12″ wide. The top shelf is 6′ wide. From bottom to top, the shelves are 11″, 10″, and 8.75″ tall. We’re not quite sure why those dimensions, but by the time we started building these, we had lost the original designs, and had to recreate it based on the length of wood that we had! All in all, this project was pretty straightforward, and only took a few Saturday afternoons to put together.