Home Made Furniture

We needed a low, narrow shelf to fit our overflow of books.  They were literally stacked on every surface, including the couch and the kitchen table.  We had been looking at some furniture stores, and through the ikea catalog, but there wasn't anything that fit the space perfectly (or really at all).  So we decided to make our own.  We went to Home Depot and bought boards and had them cut to size.  We sanded and stained them to match our other bookshelf, and used corner brackets to attach the legs.

The design of the shelf was pretty easy; we measured our largest book and decided the height of the shelves accordingly.  The length was dictated by the length of the boards at the hardware store, and they just happened to fit perfectly.  There are four legs, one on each corner, and two supports in the middle (made up of six pieces, each bracketed to the shelf on the top and/or the bottom).  We were worried that we would miss a measurement somewhere and it wouldn't fit together, but it was surprisingly easy to construct.   The middle supports basically dictated the height of the shelves, and we intentionally left the corner legs a little long to accommodate for any discrepancy in the measurements.

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And look at our new shelf!  I was afraid that the room would be too full, but it works nicely; keeping the top shelf pared down keeps the room from looking cluttered.