Bookshelf to Pantry Mod

This was the idea of my wonderful wife.  We moved to a great new house with a bit less storage space in the kitchen.  We had a bookshelf that didn't have a place in the new house.  We had a bookshelf but needed a pantry.  Hmmm...

Some great friends of ours had inherited a kitchen full of oak cabinet doors after a remodeling job.  They were kind enough to give us our pick of the doors for this project.

Now I just needed to fit four doors to the bookshelf.   Two needed to be shorter.  All four needed to be narrower.  To preserve the shape, I cut the extra out of the middle and glued the pieces together again.

Since I wanted the wood to take the stain, used a low-odor stripper, shave hooks and an abrasive wheel to remove the existing finish:


Then I ripped the doors, removing about 1 inch from the middle.  I crosscut two of the doors, removing about 6 inches of length.  Here is a stack of some of the remaining pieces:

Then I needed to stick the pieces together, so I drilled holes for dowel pins for strength and alignment (4 pins in the short doors and 11 in the long ones):

After the pieces were glued together and sanded, I applied some ebony stain. 

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