Building Hudson's Tree Bookshelf

Building the Tree Bookshelf

My awesome step-dad Steve took his whole vacation to help us build an amazing tree bookshelf for our little man's nursery. Andy helped to cut out one of trees from the wood, nail it together and sand it all down. I helped to trace them out, sand and stain and my mom and Steve worked on the tree all day for 4 days - tracing, cutting, sanding, staining -- doing it all!! My sweet Grana even came over to help sand and stain the tree. I'm so grateful for everyone helping out and making my dream become a reality. 

We started off by printing off the template found on: this website. 

We needed the tree to be 4x6 to fit on the plywood that we had... but for some reason when we followed their template, it came out much bigger. So, we rearranged it a bit, changed up a few little parts and customized it to make the template perfect for us. Our final template was traced onto some thick foam board so we could trace it onto 4 additional sheets of 4x6 plywood.

After we traced it onto the plywood, Steve (and Andy!) spent several days cutting the trees out of the plywood to make sure they matched perfectly.

After all of the plywood was cut out, the 4 pieces were glued together using liquid nails and then nailed together with a finishing gun. We then filled in any of the nail holes with wood putty and then sanded the entire tree so it was smooth on the top and the edges.

After all of the sanding was done, Mom, Grana and I were able to stain it a dark expresso color to match the wood on the glider that we have in Hudson's nursery.

The tree bookshelf turned out even better than I imagined!!