Shoe Cupboard

Our "hallway", for want of a better term, has a nice little 9" pipe running through it. This is actually the drainage from the roof, so it kinda has to stay there. Needless to say it is a silly shape, in a silly spot and looks a bit ugly. We want to use this space to have a cupboard to keep our shoes in.

I managed to make a start to that this morning while I was waiting for people to come past and perform the annual maintenance on the ventilation systems that are installed in every flat.

I'm making the shoe cupboard out of spruce which is light, cheap and easy to work - it will be stained to match the bed and the coat rack later on before getting a couple of coats of varnish.

On the left is before again where you can clearly see the pipe, and on the right are the bits of wood that are will hide it. All three bits of wood you see on there the same height - unfortunately our ceiling isn't so I'm having to be a bit creative on that front ;-)

Here I'm drilling all of the holes for the dowel joins, and the adjustable shelves, then a test fit of a couple of parts.

Tonight I put together the stange side bit that will hide the pipe, unfortunately the walls are not straight - so it fits perfectly at the top and the bottom, but there is an almost 10mm wide gap in the middle - I'm guessing I'll need to fill this with some white silicon or similar so it doesn't look crappy later.

Expect more on the weekend...

Ok it's not the weekend but things have progressed...
On the weekend I cut out all of the corners of the shelves - as they all need to fit the silly gap made by the pipe, did some sanding too, but given that I was out of it most of Saturday after the concert I didn't get a lot done... gotta say I love my saw - this took about 10 minutes including setting up the depth gauge - about 30 minutes less than doing it by hand, and as a bonus all of the shelves are the same which is not to be sneezed at ;-)

I went home a bit early from work today and managed to get most of it done... Staining:

The cupboard is the full height of the ceiling, which means I can't assemble it lying on the floor - if I did then I wouldn't be able to stand it up - so assembly took place pretty much where it was going to be and this is one of the main reasons I bought all those clamps:

And full of shoes - all that's missing is the door - maybe Thursday??:

And the door - still needs a handle, but that will be up to Polina's creative spirit when she get's back from Russia ;-)

I have to say that for a relatively small cupboard, the only purpose of which is to store shoes, this was quite a lot of work and ended up costing a fair bit of money. Much less money than the professionals wanted for it but more that I would have guessed to start with. The biggest problems were:

• the fiddly non-rectangular shape - this meant more parts to assemble, more cuts to make, more things to try and line up.
• the full height - waving 250cm bits of wood around isn't such a big deal (all this stuff is fairly light) unless your ceiling is only 250cm tall. Certainly made working on it and assembling it more of a challenge than it would otherwise have been.
• staining - the wood is naturally a very light colour, which we don't really like and doesn't go with the rest of our flat so I changed the colour by staining it to match the bed and other items. This was a pain because 90% of the pieces had to be stained on both sides (as you can see the top and bottom of the shelves, the inside and outside of the door etc... plus the wood was very absorbent - thus I used much more stain than I expected.
• varnishing - see staining, varnish one side, wait until it dries, flip it over, varnish the other side, wait, flip, sand, wipe, varnish, wait, flip, sand, wipe, varnish, wait *sigh* time consuming is an understatement.

When all's said and done - it's not perfect, it's probably less good than something made by a real carpenter, but it is finally done and looks a hell of a lot better than what we had there previously (a left over bit of kitchen, with a left over bit of curtain draped over it).

Am I happy with it - 90%; Hopefully I'll do better with the bar...