A Book-Holder for the missus

A Book-Holder for the missus

My wife to be had been complaining for some time that she had nowhere in the kitchen to hold her cook-books whilst cooking. I therefore took if upon myself to get out to the garage and come up with a suitable contraption to mend said ailment.

After a brief rummage around, I found several piece of wood that would fit the bill.

The first thing I needed to do for the lot of them was remove the rough edges by planing them all down to their finery. This took a bit longer than I expected but I got there in the end and was left with a lovely smooth finish over the majority of the wood.

Next I had to mark out the points that I would use for the dowel joints on each board. This was pretty straight forward and took a few minutes with my new go-to drill bit. Once I had the holes in place it was a case of cutting the dowels and gluing them all together.









Once they were set in place I needed to leave them for a while before I could continue with the rest of the work so that they were rigid enough to withstand some heavy kitchen work!

As I wasn't too worried about the back end of the holder, I opted to use 2 wood screws on the back for the stand. If I had had a hinge to hand, I would have used this so that it could have been folded down if needed but alas, I did not, so I decided to make the back rigid as well.

Now the lady indoors has a thing for all things pretty and feminine and as it was, the book-holder was sporting a rather manly look and needed some adjusting. So to get the heart effect in the wood, I marked out the area I wanted to use in pen and then made perfect use of my trusty angle grinder with a sanding attachment to get the grooves in its front face. This was relatively straight-forward and with a bit of practice on some more scrap pieces, I might be tempted to get even more creative in future. 

To finish the whole thing off, I used some left-over wax from a previous project an on the right here you can see the finished result. As you can see I also created some 'page-holders' by drilling 2 holes in the shelf and cut 2 more dowels that can be removed to fit differing sized books in the holder.

So that is this week's project completed, I now just need to figure out what the next one is going to be.

Thanks for looking and check back soon for my next adventure!

Cheers.