After gathering all of the supplies for our shelves (boards, saws, safety equipment, soda, etc) we were getting ready to cut the boards into the general shapes of triangles. Being an expert carpenter, I measured the walls, looked at our giant board, measured again, then decided to binge watch Netflix. That got me prepared for the really hard part about DIYing and that is actually doing the work instead of just watching YouTube videos of other people remodeling their homes.
After measuring the walls and figuring out how big we wanted the triangles to be, I placed the giant board onto my trusty workbench (a plastic fold out table) and used my circular saw to cut the board. Kara's dad said not to use a circular saw to cut our giant piece of plywood, but what does he know, he's only a general contractor and I watched someone on YouTube cut a perfectly straight cut with a circular saw, so I did what the YouTuber did and clamped a 2 x 4 to the plywood and used it as my guide to cut a perfectly straight cut down the board.
At least that's what should have happened. What actually happened was that my 2 x 4 was a little warped from leaning on a wall in the garage so while it looked straight, it wasn't completely touching the board so my circular saw went underneath the 2 x 4 and I made a nice curvy cut. Curvy cuts are really hard to do with a circular saw so I am a little impressed with myself. However, I got the saw stuck in the middle of the piece of plywood and my cut was way off.
Because the cut was on a curve and because my circular saw is battery operated, the saw quickly lost power and stopped cutting so I only had half of the board cut and my saw was stuck in the middle of the board. That's when Kara secretly called her dad and he said we could borrow his table saw. He's always so helpful when our projects go awry.
All of these mistakes and having to gather more tools costs a lot of time so this easy weekend project has already taken two weeks and the only thing we have are a half cut board that we now have to cut smaller in order to make up for the poor cutting job the YouTuber encouraged me to make. After gathering the table saw and saying many prayers that I wouldn't cut my hand completely off, we were able to cut our 16 inch (now 15 1/2 inch) shelves out of our plywood. It was really easy and quick. It's funny how fast you can get things done when you have the right tools.
After we cut the boards into three 15 1/2 inch x 4 foot boards, it was time to take out the miter saw and cut these into the general shape of triangles. Since we are experts (as in Kara's dad told us what to do) I cut the boards into 90 degree right triangles which I would then fix later by using a protractor and measuring the degrees of the corners of the wall, then measuring the degrees of the difference of our triangles, then measuring the degrees that the triangles come off of the far side, then using some simple trigonometry, which of course I have perfect memory of from the 10th grade, and then realize that I don't need to know any of this triangular geometry junk. What I really did was put my right triangles up to the wall, measured the distance from the far corner of the shelf and the wall (about 1/8 inch) and then made the mark 1/8 inch from into the right triangle, drew a line down the board from the 90 degree angle, and then cut that off. That made the 92 degree angle that I needed to match my wall.
Now we have the six triangles perfectly cut and it is time to sand the boards. We sanded the boards so that they are nice and smooth. We made sure to use the free N95 government masks that I picked up at the local pharmacy when sanding so that we didn't inhale any wood particles. We then conditioned the wood using wood conditioner and stained the wood a nice natural wood color, which is pretty much the same color as the board, only shinier. Next is gathering the wood for the face of the shelf and attach it to the wall, but first, I need to go watch YouTube on how to do this.
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