Building these projects with good bookcase plans can be both fun, and very rewarding. Walking into a room and seeing the great bookcase you built standing tall, straight, and strong will be a source of pride. You will want to put your bookcases in places where people notice, instead of hiding in a corner like the many leaning towers of books you’ve seen before.
More material for your Bookcase Budget.:
Building a bookcase step by step is an easy project that you should be able to complete in a weekend. Once you’ve mastered building basic bookcases, you may want to tackle something a little more detailed. Just make sure you have the right step by step plans for the project you are making and you can’t go wrong.
Hold off on plywood shelves… this time around – Sure, plywood is nice for bookcase shelves because it doesn’t have the warping problems that plague solid wood. But plywood comes in 4×8 sheets, which means you’ll be doing a LOT of cutting to make all the pieces for a simple bookcase. For experienced woodworkers, this isn’t really a problem. They’ll first cut down the sheet into more manageable pieces (usually with a circular saw) and then head over to an $800 table saw to get things perfectly square and perfectly sized for the bookcase plan they’re following. Not that you can’t do all this with another tool (like a circular saw or jigsaw), but at some point it just becomes too much work to make a zillion cuts in plywood without the bigger, beefy tools.
You have seen it before. You walk into someone’s home or office, and there in the corner is the bookcase they built. It doesn’t look very stable, and if you look closely it almost appears to be leaning to one side. They probably either used no plans, or they downloaded some free bookcase plans. Either way, their project looks bad, and is not very safe.
As with any woodworking project, certain techniques will be necessary in order to create a beautiful and functional piece of furniture. Essentially, for bookcases (and most any project for that matter), the most important technique will be cutting your wood square. Rabbet and dado joints are the joints used in most basic bookcases so you will need to be proficient with those.
Skill Level Specification
Some hardware stores and suppliers break them down to more manageable sizes:
Three Tools – I assume that most people attempting their first bookcase project will not have a complete set of woodworking power tools in their shop – things like a table saw, drill press, router table, planer, and all that. What I do think first-time builders might (and should) have is a circular saw, a router, and a power drill. It’s pretty amazing what you can build with just a few reasonably-priced tools.
There should be step by step instructions, accompanied by diagrams and illustrations so you would know exactly where and when to put nuts and hinges. Some bookshelf plans even include how-to videos.
