Bedside Bookshelf

The Kiddo reads books until he falls asleep, which is great (bedtime independence, hooray), but it means there are piles of books right by his pillow, which is less great.

Usually, there are even more books taking over the bed...

Luckily, I had a bunch of spare trim we used in the closet on another project, and 1x1 wood in the garage, so I quickly cobbled together a cute solution.

Even though I got a very lovely compound miter saw for my birthday, the garage workbench hasn't been set up yet, so neither has it...  I had to bust out the crummy old miter box for some simple straight cuts, and it worked just fine with my favorite pull saw.

Because the garage is a mess while we reorganize to accommodate and build the workbench, I had to get creative about miter box placement.  Don't try this at home.

A kind of dumb place to set the miter box, but it worked out OK in the end.

After I made my cuts, I clamped and glued the two pieces together.

After the glue dried for a few minutes, I put in some nails, and inset them with a nail set.

I filled the holes with some putty I had laying around, and sanded with a medium-grit sanding block that was literally just the first one I grabbed off the shelf.

I painted the whole thing (2 coats) with the same trim paint that we've used everywhere else in the house, using my new favorite, no-brush-marks-ever, foam brush.

I let it dry, then hauled it up and placed the shelf and leveled.

The whole thing, even fully loaded, is really light, so I used some small brackets that didn't work in another project, but were just right here.  Yes, that's right, friends, I am a hardware hoarder.

I used the same screw-in anchors I used for the baseball bat holder for the screws that attach the brackets to the wall, just in case the Kiddo gets any designs on pulling the shelf out along with a book.  Again, probably overkill, but better safe than patching drywall, I always say.

and TA-DA, a tidy bedtime book shelf.