A Completed Project! (mostly)

So I actually have a completed project to report. I have had a bookshelf for a while that I no longer had any use for, and on one end the veneer was pretty chewed up.

Bookshelf in its pre-project form

I was thinking to myself what I could do with the bookshelf, and it popped into my head that I could turn it into a bench. But it was way too long to just make it a bench the way it was, and the one end was crappy looking anyway, so I thought it should be cut in half.

I sanded down the end I wanted to keep, marked off where I wanted the cut, and let boyfriend cut away with the circular saw. This is where it gets a bit tricky, as it's a somewhat cheap bookcase, and it's hollow. So that left two openings in the end where the cuts were made. More on that later.

Ready for the first cut

Obviously, if I just painted it and left it like it was, it would just look like a small bookshelf on its side. So I wanted some feet for the bench. This part turned out to be more difficult than I thought, as my normal supplier, the Home Depot, did not have a good supply at all of feet. I did a little internet research and came up with some gorgeous feet, but couldn't stomach paying $25 per foot, considering I paid like $15 for the bookshelf on Craigslist. This was all shortly before going home for Christmas, so I thought I would just wait until then and make my parents drive me to every home improvement store in northern Michigan until I found the perfect feet. That turned out to be the trick and Lowes had some great feet for $6 apiece.

The feet came with nifty screw things in them, so boyfriend got out my cordless drill and drilled some holes in the bottom. I then glued and screwed them in, and got to work painting. I was originally going to paint the bench red, to match my dining chairs, but I decided to go more neutral and paint it glossy white.

In the midst of painting

So it looks all pretty for the pictures, but remember how I said there were two holes on the end? Those still aren't quite fixed, so I have some work to do, but it looks nice for now. The plan is to cut two pieces of wood perfectly sized and insert them, but we'll have to see how that all turns out.

All painted up