Wow, it's been a while (again), although this past weekend was super productive around here. One project that's been on our plate for a little while has been to add shelves above the new desk we built in the study. Between waffling on where we wanted the shelves to be hung and either being out of town or having visitors, building the shelves got put off for a little while, but it was at the very top of the to-do list this weekend. We ended up going with two shelves above the main surface of the desk, both 15" deep and built from 3/4" birch plywood with 1x2 pine tacked and glued across the face. I originally wanted to hang them the same way the desk is hung -- with ledger boards on the three walls supporting their weight -- but we ended up using shelf brackets instead since the sides would have rested on ledgers that weren't tacked into joists in the front (given that the joists are 16" apart, and the shelves are 15" deep). We want to be able to put some serious weight on these shelves (medical reference books, magazine archives, that sort of thing), so the idea of using drywall anchors made me just nervous enough to go with brackets for support.

One related interlude: we started out with the idea that using low-profile brackets like these might work out OK, sacrificing what felt like just a little bit of load-bearing capacity for the benefit of a bracket that didn't create as much of an obstacle underneath it. Thus, we hung the first shelf with these brackets, and immediately realized that the weight of the shelf itself was enough to start bowing the supports -- and that's when we both got the mental picture of what would happen when we started loading the shelves, and then immediately took the brackets down. We ended up with these, which are very slender and yet feel like they could support me up on the shelves. If we end up hating how they look or function, I can always try the drywall anchor approach, or add a backer board between the joists and then anchor a ledger into that.

A few things we did to make the results that much nicer (to us, at least!): I routed a rounded edge onto the front of the shelves using a 3/8" roundover bit, and we added a few under-cabinet lights to the bottom shelf so that we could get rid of our desk lamp and still have great light on the work surface.

After installing the quarter-round molding across the back of the surface and then touching everything up with a final bit of paint, the new desk is installed, and I'm pretty damn happy with how it came out.

The back surface of the desk is 20 inches deep, and we opted to put the PC there since it's the computer that we use the most in the office. Since the office is pretty narrow, we went with the return being only 15 inches deep, giving us more work surface without sacrificing breathing room. I doubt that we'll stick with that lamp, we have a little bit of cable management work to do, and I'm almost certain that I won't be allowed to keep the Iron Giant on the desk. (I have been promised a little bit of a shelf for him, though!)

In the end, there are a few silly little things I'd do differently were I to do this again, but nothing that comes close to me feeling like this wasn't a home run for us being able to use the study. I can't wait to get the shelves planned and installed... our inclination is to put them on the short wall above the main desk surface so that the room doesn't start to feel even more narrow, but we've bandied about the idea of partial-length shelves on the long wall. We'll see which way that debate settles out, and we'll enjoy the hell out of the room in the mean time!

One of the things that really attracted Shannon and I to this house is that it has a small "extra" room upstairs, too small to be a regular bedroom but definitely workable as a study (or perhaps someday a nursery!). Since we moved in, we tried our hardest to make the furniture we already own work in the room, but it's been a struggle -- the desk, file cabinet, and drawers I had in my luxuriously-large study back in Brookline made this room really tight, and Shannon and I realized about a month ago that it was the one space in the house that made us both annoyed whenever we had to spend more than a few minutes in it. That's not so good, so I decided to see what I could do to improve it, and came to the conclusion that a built-in desk would make a world of difference.

(An explanation of why a built-in desk was such an epiphany starts with the knowledge that the functional workspace of the study is just under 37 square feet, specifically 53 inches by about 100 inches. So every inch really matters -- and eating into that are baseboards that stick out slightly more than two inches from each wall. All of our existing furniture sat against that baseboard and hurt us by wasting the space behind it; realizing this led me to the built-in idea, and then embarrassingly, an episode of Toolbelt Diva that Shannon saw sold us.)

So, after a bit of design-by-Adobe-Illustrator, I came up with a desk idea that incorporates a 20-inch-deep main surface spanning the narrowest part of the room and a 15-inch-deep return that runs the length of the long wall, all supported by ledger boards and a few diagonal struts. The goal was to move the work surface to the most logical spot in the room and optimize the amount of floor real estate by avoiding desk-to-floor supports; that way, we can put drawers on the floor underneath the desk unimpeded by legs or supports, and we can turn in our desk chair without banging our own legs or being restricted in any way. Likewise, we wanted to see whether we liked the new layout, and thenfree up even more storage by hanging some shelves along the narrow part of the room above the desk.

The dimensions of the desk were just large enough to prevent the whole thing being able to be cut as a single piece of a 4x8 sheet of finished plywood, so I had Home Depot cut us two pieces, one for the main surface and one for the return. Using a router, I notched both pieces so they'd come together across a secure joint, and then mitered some screen molding to tack onto the facing edge. While Shannon was priming all that, I cut the ledger boards and tested them out on the walls, and just before bed last night we got the ledgers on the walls and the first coat of paint on the desk surface and supports.

This morning, Shannon started the second coat of paint while I mitered some quarter round molding to run along the back edge of the desk (thus hiding the seam where it meets the wall). We primed and painted that, and after the Eagles game this afternoon, I installed the desk on the ledger boards. As we speak, the wood filler is drying in the screw holes holding the desk onto the ledgers and supports, and later tonight I'll throw a third coat of paint on the whole setup. Tomorrow will likely bring the final step, attaching the molding to the back edge, and we should be all done! It's already clear how big a change this will be; that room will go from barely tolerable to one of my favorite in the house, and I'm sure Shannon and I will start to quibble over who gets to be sitting and working in there. We can only hope!

(Note that I put up a Flickr photo set with pictures of the whole process; the set includes the pictures from this post, but has a few more as well.)

I'm not sure how I failed to find this during my great miter saw hunt a few weeks ago, but back in 2002, someone named Tom Judkins penned an awesome post to rec.woodworking that goes into how to decide on a particular type of miter saw. His level of detail is terrific, and he includes a lot of tips on how to check whether a saw will cut true, kick your work off of the table, and help prevent injuries. It's worth a bookmark in any woodworker's browser.

The U.S. government might be engaged in a heated debate over the definition of torture, but here in Casa Queso, it's pretty clear that the term includes such things as having to take a weekend trip to Chicago the day after this box arrived as my anniversary present from Shannon:

Seriously, I cannot wait to get that bad boy set up!

After planning enough projects I want to do around the house, and watching enough DIY television, I now realize that it's insane for me not to own an miter saw. Thinking about specs, it seems like a no-brainer that I should get a compound miter saw (in other words, the motor and blade shouldn't just create angled cuts, but should also create bevels by rotating around the front/back axis). But given my two big constraints -- cost and space (we have a tiny basement we use for all our storage) -- I'm not so sure that moving up to a sliding compound miter saw for the extra $400+ that it'd add to the price is all that necessary. I'd love to hear other people's opinions, on whether my assumptions make sense, on brands that would be good for a non-pro weekend warrior like myself, and on anything else that seems appropriate!

During the househunting process, one of the very few things that Shannon and I didn't like about what has now become our home is that it pretty much has not a single usable clothes closet. The house is over a century old, and the two upstairs closets are between 13 and 15 inches deep -- not even close to deep enough for a clothes hanger. So we stressed and fretted about how we'd solve it in the weeks before we moved in, and ended up with a series of solutions that we're really happy with.

In terms of the clothes storage problem, we shopped around quite a bit for a closet system that would work in the space we had available in the master bedroom. One idea that I really wanted to work was EasyClosets, a company that provides you with the ability to design wall units online, and then ships you the materials for self-installation. Unfortunately, the place we wanted to put the closets was on an old plaster wall that wasn't exactly plumb and has a door right in the middle of it; after talking to a rep, it turns out that the EasyClosets system requires an uninterrupted back wall on which to mount the main hanging equipment, and it's not easily adaptable to weird situations like ours. We played around with a bunch of other ideas, but found our solution at (of all places!) Ikea, their modular PAX system. Using their 93 inch-tall frames, we ended up with three different levels of hanging space along with shelving and drawers galore, enough space to replicate both of the closets we had back in Brookline and then some. The whole unit sits perfectly against the back wall of the master bedroom, and took about five or six hours in total for Shannon's father and me to build.

Of course, that left us with another dilemma -- what to do with the two pre-existing closets! As shallow as they are, it wasn't hard to decide; we ended up getting 3/4-inch plywood cut down to size as shelves, and I spent the last few days hanging them up. We now have a great space in the bedroom for off-season and decorating storage, and a great linen closet in the hallway, and all it took was a bit of wood, a little circular saw and sander work, some paint, and some screws and anchors. And with one of the remnant bits of wood, I was even able to put a mini-shelf into Shannon's basement knitting area! All in all, we went from closet panic to closet and shelving nirvana, and all it took was patience.

Matt Haughey has a great how-to over at LifeHacker: How to build your own backyard deck. A few weeks ago, Matt and his wife decided that while they were going to leave to professionals the construction of a large deck up against their house, they wanted to try to build a smaller, corner-of-the-backyard deck on their own. After doing a bit of research on deck pier systems, Matt found Deckplans.com, and was able to use the company's online app to design their deck, a process which ended with the automatic generation of both a materials list and custom PDF assembly instructions. He's pretty happy with the results; here's hoping for updates later on to let everyone know how the deck stands up over time!

I've been thinking about our itty bitty back deck, and that I need to check to make sure it's been recently washed and sealed once we move down there in two weeks. I guess it's pure luck that I stumbled across a great primer on power washing that's set to run in tomorrow's issue of our new local paper -- all information that's good to know. I'm pretty certain that, without the warning, I'd be the exact type of person who puts the nozzle right up against the wood and blow the surface clean off... gotta check that urge.

One of the small projects I've done in our current home that's made me the happiest is a simple door replacement. When we moved in here, my study had a solid, unpainted wood door (no different than any other room in the apartment). We did a bit of work on doors throughout the place -- painting some, replacing hardware in others -- but never got around to working on the one to the study. (I also never thought to take a good picture of the doorway, hence the bad one here.) And because the room houses enough computers to make heat generation an issue, that door remained closed for most of the air-conditioned summer here in Boston. As a result, we lost out on all the nice light that comes in from the southern-exposure windows in the study, and the hallway stayed pretty cave-like as a result. Shannon and I finally decided that a French door might be in order.

After taking some measurements and learning that the study doorway was both nonstandard and a bit off-square, I headed down to Home Depot to find a simple, unpainted French door that I'd be able to saw down to the correct size. After bringing it home (bungie cords and a roof rack are your friend!), a friend helped me run it over the table saw, and then I used the old door to mark out the locations for the hinge leaves along the jamb of the new one. The wood of the new door was pretty soft, so I had to exercise caution in chiseling out the spots for the hinges, but after attaching them, I was able to hang the door into the frame and check for any spots that I'd have to trim further (none, thankfully!). Finally, I took the door back down and used a hole saw to drill out the spot for the doorknob set, and that was that.

One thing that made me incredibly happy was that the new door came with all the windows pre-wrapped in plastic (you can see the haze over the windows in the unpainted picture), meaning that I was then able to get to priming and painting it without having to tape anything off. (That's a lot of windows to have to tape!) Because of work and whatnot, it took me two days to finish off the painting -- but I love the result, both for how the door looks and the amount of light it lets into our hallway during the times of year that the study has to remain air-conditioned. It's enough that I wish I had replaced the door next to it (leading into the living room) at the same time, but that'll be a job for the next people who live here!