Maple Bookcase

"Talented craftsmen, reliable, reasonable and great guys. They were a pleasure to work with in designing and building a bookcase/entertainment center for our new home. I look forward to their next job with us."


We just completed this project for a couple that recently moved into a new home in The Castro. With three dozen boxes of books yet to be unpacked and a large, lonely flat screen that needed some company, their needs were immediate and plentiful. The books would be housed in a large room on the ground floor of the home, along a 24 foot expanse of bare wall that made even a 60 inch flat screen look pitiful. Indeed, a shelving surround and an A/V component cabinet were needed to give the room some balance and resolve. In terms of style and color, a precedent had been set in other parts of the room. We would borrow ideas from other casework that used clear-finished maple in a very modest style of clean lines, square edges and butt-joinery. The sketches below were some starting points for discussion.

And, the before and after.....

We did not stray far from some of the ideas we originally pitched to the clients, and we have to give them a lot of credit for the trust and faith they put into us, allowing us to work virtually unfettered from start to finish in order to meet a very tight deadline: the house-warming party. Below are some images of the install...

The Murphy Bed

We wrapped up the Murphy Bed project few weeks ago and have just gotten the opportunity to catch our breath after completing two back-to-back projects that had very short deadlines. The Murphy Bed was a success in many ways other than just the fabrication and installation of custom floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall casework. We donned the caps of a couple other trades as well, taking on all of the painting and plaster finishes in an effort to maintain schedule and control the budget to meet the clients' needs. Those are duties which we are often reluctant to assume, preferring instead to leave them to the professionals. But sometimes exceptions must be made and in this case we found it to be a worthy exercise.

Tucked into the underside of the west wall of shelving are two compartments that are intended to conceal the modem and router for the DSL. A receptacle, phone jack and cable jack were all relocated from behind the shelving to be inside the compartment.

The drawer boxes are constructed of 1/2" pre-finished Birch Europly and mounted on ball-bearing drawer glides. The lower drawer glide had to be positioned in such a way so as not to conflict with the through-bolted hinge hardware of the Murphy Bed.

To create a seamless look along the baseboard of the Murphy Bed panel, we hinged the baseboard independent of the main panel using concealed hinges.

The baseboard is lowered first, then the Murphy Bed is ready to fold down. In the photo below we are using a temporary strap for pulling the panel. We are awaiting the arrival of the final hardware pulls which will be installed at a later date.

There is a variety of Murphy Bed hardware on the market but the brand we found to be of the greatest quality is Hafele. http://www.hafele.com/us/documents/Bed_lift_27192132.pdf

This model comes with gas pistons (as opposed to spring mechanisms found on other brands), a built-in box spring of pre-finished Elm wood slats, and fold-out legs that retract automatically while lifting the bed into the closed position. The hardware is intended to be used with a standard mattress that is 7 to 8 inches thick, weighing approximately 60 to 80 pounds. Of course, along with quality comes a price: this model runs around $3k and does not come with a cabinet enclosure (such as the one misleadingly represented in the PDF link above.)