Since my niece has been spending so much time here lately, I have found myself short some storage furniture. So I decided I was going to build a shelf unit to fit Cierra’s toys and books on. I shared this idea with my family, and my brother very quickly became involved (which was welcome, as we work well together). I had planned to build just a regular bookcase type of piece, but my brother searched online for other ideas, and found a concept for a windowseat composed of two stand-alone shelf units bridged together with an additional plank. So I crunched the numbers and planned the cuts and we set off for our local home improvement supplies store to get the necessary materials.
We cut all of our pieces from a single sheet of furniture-grade 3/4″ plywood. I paid $2 extra to have the large cuts done at the store (partly so our plywood would fit in my car, and partly because it’s better to pay $2 to have it done right than to try to figure out how to manage an eight-foot by four-foot sheet of 3/4″ plywood in my garage workshop). So I went home with four eighteen-by-forty-eight-inch pieces, one eighteen-by-twenty-three-and-a-half-inch piece, and one thirty-by-twenty-three-and-a-half-inch piece. I also bought two eight-feet long pieces of 3/4″ trim, and four “L” brackets rated for 85lbs each. I later went back to the store for more trim because my brother took it all the way around the tops, and I’d calculated only for the front, so I was nine feet short.
When we got home, we set immediately to work. As I said, my brother and I work well together. I measured off the cuts, and he made them. And he was tickled giddy to get to play with my nail gun. We talked our way through the first piece and it took a bit of time, but for the second piece we’d already done all our problem-solving, so it came right together. We left off cutting the bridge plank for after the two shelves were in place in the window and we knew for certain what the distance between them would be.
By the end of the night, we had two beautiful pieces of furniture. They were stain-grade and lovely. And I deeply regret not taking pictures of them as they were then. I’d planned to paint them white to match the trim in my room, since the finished product was meant to look built-in. But my sister and my brother’s girlfriend thought white was boring, and I let them pick different paint colour(s), instead and… *sigh*… I hate it. It’s not that bad, really, but if you only saw how beautiful they were before they were painted, you’d cry over it now, too. Because now they just look like common shelves painted a garish blue and green. And they really don’t match the style of my room. (Also, if I’d known they were going to look so nice finished, I would’ve planned to stain them, rather than painting them any colour(s).)
But the design is still kind of nifty:
“Windowseat” - Photo date: May 9, 2009
We tested it. The seat can hold my brother (200 pounds), my brother’s girlfriend (110 pounds) and me (95 pounds), all at the same time. I think it’ll hold my niece.
I still need to make the cover for the cushion. Since I let my brother’s girlfriend pick the paint, I’m letting her pick the fabric for the cushion cover, too, so I can’t finish it until she’s decided. Meanwhile, I’m already planning to repaint or strip and stain it in about a year (after we’ve “appreciated” the blue and green long enough that nobody’s feelings are hurt), and I’ll probably have to re-cover the cushion then with something that doesn’t go with that vivid blue and green.
