If I were a Carpenter

Whilst I am a bit of a sucker for Ikea furniture sometimes they just don’t do anything that is suitable. Such an example is shelving storage for my burgeoning collection of CDs. I did buy some cabinets from Ikea a few years ago but they are now all full and I am increasingly finding bending down to see them is becoming more and more of a pain – both for the eyes and the back. Oh, the joys of middle age! Anyway, after browsing around various DIY websites on the Internet I came across something that would fit the bill nicely: Hungarian Shelves. The one problem is that I would have to construct them from scratch. Well, how hard could that be? The answer is “very”.

The thing is that there is a big difference between what I image my carpentry skills are like and what the sad reality is. Somehow, I imagine that my wood working skills are in the same league as the great cabinet makers: Thomas Chippendale, Henry Copeland, Jesus and so on. In fact, I am what is technically known as a klutz. The problem is that Ikea gives the impression that one is in possession of some sort of basic furniture building skills when in fact one is merely constructing pre-fabricated components in a build-by-numbers fashion. Far from being a skilled craftsman I am reduced to being merely a gorilla with an Allen key. Anyway, I had bought all the wood now so I was just going to press on.

The first thing was to mark out the bits that needed cutting. Calculating the distances is easy enough. What I may lack in manual dexterity I do at least have in terms of mental arithmetic. Marking out the cut marks with a pencil should be easy enough but I found that I couldn’t see close-up clearly enough with my glasses on and after taking my glasses off to mark the wood with the pencil I couldn’t see far enough to where I left my try square – or my glasses for that matter. I thought that cutting the wood would be easier - but it wasn’t. After the first few cuts I was exhausted. Surely, I wasn’t that unfit? I seem to recall my old woodwork teacher saying something about letting the saw do the work for you – mine clearly wasn’t which pointed along to the sad fact that my old tenon saw was knackered. There is an old saying that a poor workman blames his tools but I think it is more a case that a good workman will use the correct tools for the job in the first place.

I ended up going down to the hardware shop to part with more hard earned cash to buy a new saw. The difference was like night and day. It’s true – the saw really does do the work for you. It still took quite a while to do and even then, I had to supplement my toolset with a wood rasp, a new chisel (as the handle had dropped off my old one), some wood glue, a swear box, a first aid kit and a long shower afterwards. Additionally, this exercise didn’t involve a visit to the accident and emergency department so I would regard this as a bonus. However, after two days worth of sawing, chiselling, sanding, swearing and gluing I had come up with this:

Essentially, all my efforts had created what was effectively my own Ikea-style flat pack kit. I still have to varnish the thing before I can even attempt to drill into the wall and mount the thing. Maybe that’s a task for next weekend?