cimorene

waxjism has been tweeting some progress photos of the wardrobe-building process, during which she did all the sawing and screwing and most of the hammering, in this thread.

I made the plans, such as they are, which included a bunch of math and drawings and trying to make a cardboard 3D model, although I hesitate to call it plans exactly because of the amount of stuff we discovered we had to change when we started actually doing things. Because the floor is really uneven, in the planning stage we both thought we would need to start with a level platform, but we didn't want to put a flat top on a platform after all the trouble of leveling it only to have to screw the vertical supports straight down onto it, so we were going to put them inside it, only it didn't occur to us until Wax had actually screwed four boards together into a box that that would mean the verticals weren't leveled anyway so there was no benefit to the box and we took it apart.

We actually more or less followed the construction order mentioned in the Ana White post I linked in my last post, building the ladders that support the shelves first and then screwing them to horizontal boards at the top, middle and bottom to hold them together. Actually we were able to level the whole thing handily by shimming under the legs after we'd done all of that and it stayed reasonably good through the process of screwing it to the wall (through the protruding ends of the horizontal back bracers which were supposed to be hidden by a siding of tongue-and-groove paneling, and then with an angle bracket to the side wall). We had several big sheets of particle board cut to size at the sawmill and sized to fit behind the shelves and between the ladders, secured to the horizontal straps on the outside (there's a vertical stripe on the right side because I drew my plans with an additional ladder there and when we looked at them standing up we decided we didn't need it). (The wall panel on the right side is mounted completely outside of the ladder and it looked a bit awkward until the face frame went on.)

Anyway, the Ana White plan is for freestanding bookshelves a bit like Ikea's Hejne, and the bottom shelf is just that, a bottom shelf, but when making our shopping list I forgot that the bottom shelf on ours is actually a raised floor, because we need to cover an unlevel floor with holes, water damage and a big chunk of cement in it; so I DID remember not to put shelf boards for it on the shopping list but I didn't remember to put... a surface for the floor there. The result was that we had the stuff to make this whole wardrobe EXCEPT not the floor (or the doors) and Wax thought we should use the beautiful pre-finished tongue and groove boards purchased for the outside wall of the wardrobe (I was looking forward to this wall and had in fact been looking for a place in the house to use these boards because I love them) to make the floor, because the particle board is only 11mm thick and wouldn't be sturdy enough. Which was true! The floor became beautiful and I said "We'll need to buy some more of these boards tomorrow," only then when tomorrow arrived - that is, today - Wax figured out she could cover the wall-less side of the wardrobe with three vertical ribbons of leftover particle board of unequal width instead. It's covered, but it does KIND of look like shit and has some extremely obvious seams that I now need to figure out how to cover. But it's also kind of a dark and out-of-the-way corner now that I look at it, which makes it not worth the extra expense of removing this chewing-gum-and-tinfoil solution in order to put (expensive) new paneling there instead.

As mentioned in my last post, the shelves are only at the back of the wardrobe and there's plenty of storage space on the floor, or there will be once we can finish unpacking and it's no longer home to random junk that we were trying to get out of the way. The right side is meant to hold hanging rods, but we forgot to buy the hardware to mount them, so they will have to be added later, along with the doors. (I'm still not 100% sure what the doors should be made of and how big they should be.) And in spite of the basic brownness of the particle board, I've changed my mind about painting the inside of it, at least for now, because the fresh pine smell inside it is so pleasant. Obviously the outside will be painted, once it's finished with some yet-to-be-determined trim.