During the move to my 11th cubicle in a year at my office space (co-working space growing pains), we ended up with this weird corner space that really really needed a bookshelf to organize our crap.

After searching on IKEA and Target and all the usual suspects, I remembered that I had a house that we were busy demolishing and a fairly huge stack of “reclaimed wood,” a.k.a. things in the demolition pile, and a basement workshop full of awesome tools to play with.  Obviously, it would be easier to just build a bookshelf that fits in the space and meets our needs, right?

I mean, this is our basement workshop:

Don’t all the corrugated tin walls look like a creepy murder room?
Oh wait, it probably was one.

Just kidding, that picture was from when we first moved into the house, just after we removed the shower curtain/vapor barrier that was covered with wet moldy carpet remnants and discovered the newts living under them.

THIS is our basement workshop:

This workshop is pretty sexy, no?
The main workbench is an antique surgical table bought off of Craigslist. Totally preserves that “creepy” feeling.

Anyways, I pulled shelves out of our demolition pile in our garage, ones that I had already labeled “not worth saving” and set to work putting together this office bookshelf, armed with a general idea, some measurements from the office, a rough sketch, and an extra set of man hands.

This pile of yucky wood boards from the walls of the attic:

Nail-filled, tar-paper-covered,
fairly musty reclaimed wood.

Took about 5 hours, some elbow grease, a hand sander, and lots of force (some of the 2x3s were warped) to become this:

She is a thing of beauty.
(The bookshelf, not the man-butt.)

Not all the wood was super-old; we did find this awesome note on one of the 2x3s:

ADAM DYOTT, 3/4/88, THE BEST CARPTER IN THE WORLD.  
What is a carpter?!

And here is the bookshelf in its rightful space, in action:

Now to actually organize the bookshelf…

What was trash is now treasure again! Here’s to hoping that there are many more reclaimed wood projects in the works.  Maybe I can make the radiator covers in the house out of reclaimed wood this summer.  So ambitious, so many projects, not enough time!