Build this bookcase.

At first, I thought I could just buy a big piece of birch plywood and get the guys at Home Depot to chop it down to the many individual pieces. I never got around to trying that. I asked my dad instead, when we were home for Christmas. Lucky for me, my dad’s a pretty great woodworker. And he’s got all the necessary tools to cut the wood. After seeing how much work it was to cut all the 1-inch, and 2-inch segments, I’m glad I didn’t ask at Home Depot. They would’ve laughed in my face and told me to buy a saw instead.

I had my dad cut several pieces of wood at these heights (below). The book ends are 8.5-inches tall. And yes, I carried all the pieces back to Dallas with me in my carry-on!

To determine how many pieces I needed at each height, I measured the spine of the cookbooks we had at home.

I sanded all the pieces with super fine sandpaper. In the process, I inhaled a bunch of sawdust and injured my shoulder. Next time, I think I’ll have to get an automatic sander. After sanding, I arranged the wood pieces to make sure the books and case would look nice together.

Then it came down to gluing and staining the case. I used strong wood glue and a dark wood stain (no varnish).

The wood was actually kind of tough to glue together, because all the interior segments are different heights.

So the steps were: glue, wait 24 hours, then stain. I did two coats of stain, sanding the wood down with steel wool after each coat. Here it is after the first coat:

I haven’t had a lot of experience with wood glue or stain, but I learned that I should be more careful with the glue. The areas where the glue dribbled over ended up being stain-resistant. And that’s even after I wiped off the excess glue and sanded the area. It didn’t ruin the case, but it’s not very pretty.

After the stain was all dry, my bookcase was ready to go.