This is the second part in a two part series about how to design, build, and finish a simple woodworking project.  Please read Part 1 for more info and background on the project.  This section will mainly focus on finishing the bookshelf.

Staining wood projects is a hassle and you can quickly get in over your head.  When I first started looking for methods to stain my projects, I was bombarded with choices:

• Oil or water based?
• Which color should I use?
• How long should the stain be left on the wood?

All of these variables left me confused on what I should do.  With a good bit of research, I found the answers to my questions.  My solution may not be best for everyone, but I do have justification for my choice.

The Big Question: Oil or Water Based?
This isn’t the first time I’ve finished something, and in my experience oil based stain is nasty stuff.  While it does provide the best color in many cases, the cons of using them far outweigh their pros for me.  Oil based stains let off a lot of hazardous fumes.  These stains take longer between coats and also require paint thinner or mineral spirits for clean up.  This in itself is hazardous.  There are tons of stories of people improperly disposing of old rags with paint thinner on them,  which simply combust and start large fires.

Water based stains, on the other hand, offer fairly rich colors with short drying times.  They also release fewer fumes than oil based stains.  Clean up is a breeze as you can usually just wash everything up in the kitchen sink.

The stain we chose was a Vintage Cherry Water Based Stain Dye from General Finishes.  To seal it all in we chose to use a Satin Finish Water Based Poly/Acrylic. General Finishes actually has a youtube account with videos about how to apply their stains.

The previous projects I finished still didn’t have the lustre and look of a professionally finished piece of furniture.  A big hint I learned was that everyone uses wood filler and wood putty to fill in the pores of the wood and give it an even look.  Armed with this information, I went to my local Woodcraft store.  The sales associates there are incredibly helpful and have lots of practical experience with woodworking.  They pointed me straight to the Timbermate WB Wood Fill.  This goo can be cut with water to create a good wood filler, or could be used in its thicker form as wood putty.   Since the bookcase is made of Red Oak, I chose the appropriate colored wood putty. In the end, this really didn’t matter as the stain we chose was so dark it would overpower the color of the filler, but I chose this color putty for use in future projects as well.

Staining:
Make sure that you will be in the appropriate temperature range to stain your project (basically anything over 65° is fine.)   Since we built the bookcase in December, we had to wait until about April before it was warm enough outside to stain.  The first thing you want to do is sand the entire bookshelf with increasingly fine sand paper.  We started with some 220 grit and last used 320 grit.  This will smooth down a lot of the surface and allow the wood filler to even everything out.  With Red Oak, this takes a very long time if done by hand as it is a very hard wood and is resistant to sanding.  You may end up going through a lot of sand paper, but if you leave the piece rough, the stain will not look good.

With so many different sanding blocks, it is easy to get confused about which is which, especially if they have been used a lot.  We found a simple solution to this problem was to write the grit of the sanding block on the foam of the block with a Sharpie before using it.  This way they are always identifiable, even when the grit is wearing low in some areas.

To apply the wood filler you will need some type of squeegee.  We used old gift cards, supermarket points cards, and junk mail credit cards.  Each of these has a different rigidity, and therefore each is all better suited for certain areas of project.  The more rigid ones work best when trying to get into hard to reach spots while the least rigid ones work best on large open surfaces.

Get a clump of wood filler and mix it with just a bit of water to achieve a smoother consistency.  Then use one of the cards to smear and squeegee the filler along the grain of the wood. It’s okay if it’s a bit nasty-looking.  You will sand it down a couple more times.   Just make sure it isn’t too thick.  If it dries too thick, simply wet your finger, and rub the spot until it evens out.  Use it in its thicker form as wood putty to fill in any holes or cracks you might have from sloppy cutting, or sloppy workmanship.  When stained, this will go a long way in making your project looking more professional.

Once it is dry, sand it with it 220 grit paper, and then hit it with 320 grit sand paper and wipe it down with a clean dust cloth in preparation for the stain.  Never use tack cloth to clean the piece.  Tack cloth has waxes and oils in it that can make your stain look nasty in the finished piece.  The best thing we found to use for this purpose is a cheap microfiber dusting cloth.

Staining was an interesting exercise in finding what works best.  Everyone says to use little foam brushes to brush on the stain, and then wipe it off a short time later with a rag.  While this may be good for large sections, such as the top and shelves, we found we got a more even finish by brushing on the stain and simply rubbing it with the rag.   As the day went on, we eventually neglected the brushes all together.   At all times, though, you should apply the stain in the same direction as the grain of the wood.

The only thing to worry about when applying the stain is to make sure that you do not spill or drip any excess stain or any water on the wood.  If you do, it will either lighten or darken that area in the shape of the spill.  This can be very hard to fix, but gently rubbing with a stain-soaked cloth worked best.   Do one coat at a time if you can.  We found it practically impossible to do the entire piece coat by coat, and ended up doing different sections one by one because the stain dries so quickly.

When you are finished staining, allow it a few hours to dry.  It is best to read the instructions printed on the stain can for optimal results as different formulations require different times.  When it is completely dry, it will look rather dull.  This is because you have to put on the Poly/Acrylic Finish.

While staining, it wasn’t a big concern when tree leaves or a little pollen fell onto the piece.  Stain isn’t thick and won’t seal in impurities in the wood, but the Poly/Acrylic will.  We opted to do this step in the kitchen (with the windows opened for ventilation.)   We wanted to be sure nothing would disturb it while it dried.   The Poly/Acrylic topcoat takes 2 hours to dry between coats, and the more coats you use the better the finish looks.  Apply the topcoat with a foam brush with the grain, making sure there are no bubbles or drips in the finish.  The grain really starts coming through at this point.

After the first coat is dry, lightly sand the whole piece with 320 grit sand paper, wipe with a clean dust rag and apply another coat.  You will notice the lustre improving with each coat.

Once you get the look you want, you are finished!  We let the top coat dry for a few hours then moved it into position under the window in the living room to dry for the next few days. It actually takes about two weeks for the Poly/Acrylic to harden completely.  Once it was completely dry, we filled it with books.

This project was a big learning experience. I really enjoyed the whole process, from designing the bookcase to be built with the tools I had on hand, to finishing it.   If I had to do it all over again, I would probably try to find a local cabinetry place or woodworking shop and see if I could use their planar and joiner to flatten and straighten the wood planks.  This would have made it easier to fit together since a couple of the pieces are bowed a bit.  I would also like to learn to use a router to make a nice smooth decorative edge on the top and the footing of the bookcase.  This would make it look and feel more like a bought piece.   I‘d likely also stain it more of a mahogany color, as the cherry can be a bit too red for my taste.

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This is the first part in a two part series about how to design, build, and finish a simple woodworking project.  This part focuses on the design and build of the project.

Jessica and I tend to collect a lot of books.   I mean a LOT of books.  When one of those cheap 7ft tall particle board bookcases we had finally bit the dust, and fell on me, I decided we would only get solid wood bookcases from now on.  I also decided that it was probably best that the bookcase we get to replace the broken one be rather short, something that would fit just under the window in our living room. With the cost of solid wood bookcases being pretty high and nothing available suiting our needs exactly, I decided we should design and build one ourselves. Rather than trying to fit a new bookcase into our living room, why not design one that already fits?

This project was a practice in two arts.  Firstly, it was an excuse to teach myself how to use Google Sketchup, and secondly I wanted to get more experience with woodworking.  Most of the earlier projects I did with wood were literally laughed at (and many with good reason), so I had plenty of room to grow.

The first step in this whole process was to design something to build. I researched a lot on the internet for the perfect bookcase style. I didn’t find anything that I could easily build with the tools I had laying around.  Being in a small apartment without a garage, it is hard to store table saws and the like.  The tools I have are power hand tools, a circular saw, a power sander, an electric drill, and other simple things like that.

I finally decided on what I would build.  I took elements from many book cases I saw online and started drawing up my idea in Sketchup.  The easiest way to do this, I’ve found, is to simply create a particular piece of wood, then make that piece a “component.”  Then you can treat the whole thing as a single object.  I will go into more depth about Google Sketchup and even the Sketchup physics engine in other posts, feel free to check them out.

After lots of playing around, and learning the basics of Sketchup, I ended up with this:

Bookshelf Front in Sketchup

Everything in the design could easily be bought from any lumber yard or hardware store. It consisted of 1”x2”s, 2”x12”s, and 1”x4”s.  Sadly, these measurements are the wet weight measurements, before the wood is fully dried.  When dried, the wood actually shrinks a good bit.  Here’s a chart that may help you find the actual sizes of dimensional lumber.  I already knew this fact; however for some reason I completely ignored it when designing.  So back to the drawing board I went.

I planned on making this out of Red Oak (which is a hardwood).  The dimensions of hardwood lumber are a little different, but since I’m cutting by hand, the difference of 1/16^th of an inch between the dimensions won’t matter.   I redrew the design to account for the different wood sizes.  This wasn’t very hard as I had made all the wood pieces components, and copied and pasted things that were the same size.  In Sketchup, editing one of a group of the same components changes all other components automatically.  For instance if I changed the height of one side, the other side will change automatically.  This speeds up corrections somewhat. There is also an option to make a particular component unique, so changes made to it only apply to that particular part.

Once I had the design, I had to figure out a way of connecting the parts.  Of course I would use screws and glue, but how would I connect everything together without showing the screw holes?  I stumbled on a neat joinery method called “pocket screws”.  Pocket screws use a jig to drill a hole diagonally through the end of one piece of wood, and into another.  This can completely hide the screw while still making a very strong connection.

How Pocket Holes Work

With all the wood dimensions I needed, I was off to the local super-hardware center.  At many super-hardware centers, they offer boards by the foot.  They’ll even cut it to length for you.  So I looked for the straightest, cleanest Red Oak boards I could find (there weren’t many).  Finally deciding on certain boards, I asked for help from one of the store associates who ran the saw. Now, anyone with common sense knows that when you use a saw blade to cut a piece of wood, you are actually removing a strip of wood the thickness of the saw blade.  Apparently, this is not in the training video for this particular super-hardware store as the associate proceeded to cut my parts “through the center of the measurement mark.”  Worse than that, he was inconsistent with it.  Sometimes he would cut the center of the measurement mark, and sometimes he would cut it a bit short, and sometimes a bit long.  All of this threw my measurements off again.

I grabbed a pocket hole jig kit and wood glue on my way out of the store after gathering all my poorly cut lumber.  The approximate price breakdown is:

• Lumber = $160
• Tools and Glue  = $30

It was a fairly expensive project, but completely worth it.  Overall, this project still cost less than buying a brand new solid wood under-window bookcase, especially if it were custom built.  Not to mention all the fun that was had and all the stuff we learned while building it.

Finally having all the parts, I knew I’d have to cut most of the boards smaller again to resize them all.  I redrew the design yet again in Sketchup to make sure it would all work out.  After this, Jessica and I got to work.  We cut and rough-sanded all of the parts.  Sanding took forever as Red Oak is a very hard wood.  It was December of 2008, and we were working outside on the back deck, so instead of taking time to take loads of detailed pictures of the process and freezing to death, we hurriedly put it together exactly as the Sketchup file shows.

The Final Sketchup file can be downloaded from the Google 3d Warehouse. Feel free to edit it and repost it (as long as you give us inspiration credit . )

Since it was winter, we couldn’t stain the bookshelf as it was way too cold outside for the stain to set.  The stain cannot be applied below 65°.  Part 2 of this article goes through the process (with more pictures) and the results of staining.