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| Tractor! |
Getting a long bookcase into a car proved challenging. Wood is not like a sponge ball that can be squeezed into tight gaps, there’s no give whatsoever so trying to shoehorn it across the front and back seats of a Ford Focus is a feat worthy of Houdini himself. It reminded me of the last time I bought a smaller sized pair of stretch jeggings, wondering why my face had turned purple as I attempted to squeeze my thunder thighs into a fabric tube only wide enough to accommodate an octopus tentacle. Size matters.
And this is particularly important when you arrive at the other end of your journey if what you’ve carefully carted across at least 4 counties then has to travel up a set of stairs. Stairs that might be narrow. Stairs that have twisty landings or low ceilings or newel posts with knobbly bits that stick out. Yes, that kind of stairs.
After a great deal of huffing, puffing, to me, to you and almost blowing the house down, the bookcase finally reached the home office, cheerily greeting its other half already being put to good use by my son.
Assembly of the corner unit couldn’t have been easier. Firstly, put ready-made plinth into position along the front of the existing skirting board at right angles to the first unit. The plinth has not been secured in any way because the weight of books plus it being butted up tightly to the other plinth should keep it from moving.
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| Hello old friend |
Next step – carefully lift bookcase onto plinth taking care to push it back fully so that it minimises any gaps between wood and wall.
To secure this bookcase to the wall, six small right-angled brackets painted blue are being used. Use two brackets underneath each end of top, middle and bottom shelves. Screw one side of the bracket into the wooden shelf using screws small enough not to pierce through. Screw the other side of the bracket into the wall using long masonry screws.
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| Small metal brackets to hold unit against wall |
Now the other half, bless him, is not the JR Ewing of the DIY world as he hates drilling into anything harder than a jam doughnut and as we’ve discovered – there’s bricks and there’s bricks. In this instance he can be forgiven for splashing out on yet another power tool – a meaty SDS drill. SDS drills with SDS drill bits can apparently slice through the hardest masonry like a hot knife through butter so well worth the money particularly if you’ve got a number of projects likely to need this level of hammer action.
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| SDS drill for those tougher than usual bricks |
Using your brackets to help mark up hole positions, lift the bookcase unit off the plinth to drill holes and fit raw plugs ready for securing.
Once wall holes drilled, replace bookcase and secure in place with long masonry screws. There! That’s never going to fall down even with a few weighty tomes on it.
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| Secured to the brick wall |
Having secured the bookcase, time to turn thoughts to the plinths. I’ve designed the corner unit so that the plinths themselves are slightly smaller than the bottom shelves with a view to fitting a front fascia that matches the existing skirting boards. Visually, this will look like the skirting runs continuously round the room below the corner unit.
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| Making the plinths look like skirting |
Luckily, a close match was found in Wickes to the existing skirting board which has a profile called ‘Torus’ and is approximately 12 cm high. One 2.4 metre length is enough to cover the front of both units but you can work out how much you’ll need by adding all the linear measurements of each section together.
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| Double sided skirting - Torus & Ogee profiles |
Of course, it’s never just going to be a case of chopping up a bit of skirting then sticking it onto a plinth because there’s the corners to be accounted for. In this case both an internal and external corner. Give the other half a gold star for making his own mitre box out of two pieces of scrappy timber because his plastic box wasn’t as tall as the skirting. Genius!
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| Home made mitre box same height as skirting |
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| Working out how to mitre the corners of the skirting |
With skirting pieces cut to size and corners mitred, it’s simply a case of a couple of coats of primer followed by white gloss then sticking them onto the plinths but that’s a job for another day.
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| Skirting fascia ready to prime then paint |
