Small bookcase pt. 1

After a long hiatus, I have decided to breathe some life back into this blog. My woodworking was cut short last spring due to other interests taking time, and we have since I last posted moved to Stockholm. While my workspace was limited before, inspiring the name of this blog, it is now entirely non-existent.

But I hope that maybe I can inspire other apartment-bound craftspeople to explore the possibility of developing their craft despite lacking a workspace.

We need a small bookcase in one of the rooms in our new apartment, the "loggia" as it's called on the floorplan.

I had an offcut of 28mm thick laminated pine 60 cm deep by about 80 wide. I took a bit of 15x44mm stock from my pile, and got four cheap laminated pine bookshelves. All just homecenter stuff. To start with I would need to rip the 60cm piece into three pieces each just shy of 20cm wide.

I set up a workspace in my loggia, using an Alvar Aalto bench and our "sofa" with its new deep bench as my worksurface (no prize for guessing the origin of the off cut). One of the shelves leveled things out.

I used a saw guide and my jigsaw. Of course one could use a handsaw. Careful there with the saw... 

The three pieces would need to have their edges dressed, so I set up the kitchen table as a planing bench clamping to this scrap of post.

Eventually I moved the clamp closest to me so I wouldn't run into it.

Then I planed the shelves down to the same width. Stock preparation finished!