Solid wood sewing-fabric shelves, in the style of Ana White

My wife loves to sew, but her fabric collection was becoming hard to handle. She needed a place to organize it.

Could I build her some shelves based on Ana White’s cubby design? She wondered.

“Sure thing!” I said. It looked simple enough. I could build it for her birthday, which was a couple of weeks away.

That was in June 2016. I finally finished the shelves, more than two birthdays later.

Whoops.

This delay isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. I actually completed building the frame and shelves shortly after the first birthday goal, so Abby has been using them for a while. I just needed to finish the top for cosmetic purposes. But I feared messing it up, whether by picking the wrong wood or making a mistake during construction.

Finally, I got the gumption to dive back in. I settled on a butcher-block-style slab made from pre-surfaced oak boards. And I promptly screwed it up.

You won’t see this in the above video, but I didn’t use enough glue, so there were noticeable gaps between the boards. I had to cut them all apart and start over.

Yet even though my worst fears came true, it was still no big deal. And the second glue-up went swimmingly. I shouldn’t have waited so long.

Oh well. I still got it done.

Time to procrastinate about the next thing.

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