Simple Bedside Shelves

We finally got Aaliyah & Layla to clean out their rooms and purge a lot of their older toys and books. The rooms look more streamlined now, but I did note that they tended to drop their books and DSi's in the floor near their beds when it was 'lights-out'. We thought about getting them bedside tables, but decided against that as it would make their already small rooms look more cluttered.

So it was off to the drawing board and this is what I came up with. I envisioned a curved shelf on which they could rest their gaming consoles for the night while being charged, and a shelf below in which could be kept their books that are currently being read.

I did not plan on spending anything on this with the exception of my time. Thankfully I had some ¾" MDF in the crawl space and some ¼" MDF from the barricades that we had made to keep Coach confined to the Kitchen when he was younger.

I cut the pieces on the circular saw, used the jigsaw to shape the tops and bottoms and then glued and nailed them together using a Pneumatic brad nailer. I finally had a chance to use the Ryobi OSS500 that I scored on Craigslist for only CAD 40.00. This unit is no longer in production and the closest alternatives are from Rockwell and Ridgid. The tool did an amazing job of profiling the sides to match the contour of the half ellipse that forms the top and bottom. - Shout-out here to my cousin JB who was kind enough to drive over to the Danforth area and collect and hold on to the tool for me.

I finally coated the cut edges of the MDF with joint compound and will let it dry till tomorrow when I will sand and paint. The joint compound stops the MDF from soaking in the paint and appearing rough.

Here they are, prior to filling in with the joint compound. The girls are quite eager to have these put up in their rooms and I will have to paint prior to their return from school tomorrow. I'll do another post when they're painted and on the walls.

These wound up looking like Horn Tweeters