- I was recently scrolling on TikTok,
and I saw this, and I was like,
"That is the most amazing bookshelf I've ever seen."
And when I looked a bit closely, I was like,
"I reckon I can make that. I reckon I can."
There's no instructions,
and I have no idea how to do it.
Look, I can't really say I've done much handyman stuff
around this house, other than hang a Lego artwork,
and...
no, that's about it.
That's the extent of my DIYs in this place.
So this is gonna be fun.
Because this is a custom bookshelf for custom books,
it's made to measure,
I wanted to use some really meaningful books.
Now, I love Banksy, so I've got a Banksy book in there.
I love naked men,
so there's this book full of naked men in there.
I've also got a book of Annie Leibovitz' photography,
and I've got a book on gardening,
'cause I love, God, I love gardening so much.
And then I've got this really shitty book
that some arsehole wrote. It's terrible.
You should buy it 'cause I think sales aren't doing so well.
Once I had all my books measured,
it was time to go to Bunnings and buy the plywood.
I'd never done this before.
Look at me, look at me try.
You can really tell I have no idea.
I have no idea. I'm just pretending for the camera.
Yep, I'll just carry this around here.
That looks right about right.
I ended up finding out
Bunnings will actually cut them to size.
So I got them to trim down the plywood,
and then I obviously have to do the fancy cuts.
So I bought a spinning saw thing, some saw horses.
Look at my car, look at me go.
And then I set it all up,
did some quick measurements,
and I traced out where I wanted to cut out
on different pieces of plywood.
Once I was confident and I knew what I had to cut out,
I gave Dad a quick call.
- I just need some help before I embark on a project
that I think is gonna injure me.
- [Mum] You're not abseiling, mate.
- Look what I bought.
- [Mum] Oh my God.
That's gonna kill you.
- [Dad] Okay. The guard should rise up automatically.
On its last little bit of travel,
it might get a little bit stiff.
What you really need, is once you've done one cut,
you really need to have a clamp.
Oh, see how you've got that clamp there?
- Oh, I've got more clamps.
Do you want me to put a clamp on that?
- [Dad] So when you've cut that cut,
you clamp where the cut is so the bit doesn't fall down.
Once you've got to that point, the guard should be up,
so you don't have to worry about holding it,
and you just steady that piece of timber,
and you run the saw through, and you hold it still,
you take the finger off the trigger,
you let it down to nothing,
and then you take the saw out.
And give us a ring back in a couple of hours
if you still have enough fingers to use.
- All right, thanks, Dad. - [Dad] Good luck, mate.
Thank you.
- [Dad] Bye Bye.
- My favorite part of my conversation with Dad
is he knows how absolutely useless I am.
And 10 minutes after I called him,
he called me back to be like, "Are you okay?
Get a first aid kit."
But I decided that I also wanted a practical
hands on lesson, so I called my most handiest
of lesbian friends, Trudy,
to talk me through exactly what I needed to do.
(saw grinding)
I did it!
Stop it. You just witnessed me use a circular saw,
which is what that thing is called, I learnt,
for the first time.
I feel so accomplished.
And look how hot and sexy I am.
Here's some more shots.
(saw grinding)
How do carpenters do this? I'm so exhausted.
- [Trudy] You've cut three pieces.
- Okay, okay, and cutting.
(saw grinding)
- I just can't believe it looks so good.
So I propped it up and I put the books in
just to sort of make sure that it was actually gonna work.
And look at this, it absolutely works!
Look how amazing it is. I'm so excited.
Now I have to glue the pieces together.
And, obviously,
(vacuum whirring)
I had to clean up the enormous mess that I made.
But there's something really quite ASMR
about watching someone vacuum in five times the speed.
So I glued the pieces together,
and clamped them, and let them sit overnight,
and then I basically screwed them.
So I glued the individual book chunks of plywood.
And now, I ordered them in the order that I want,
and I'm screwing them all together
just to make sure that they don't fall apart.
I don't know.
Someone told me I should screw them as well,
so I'm screwing them together.
Then I decided that I wanted two
of the full pieces of plywood on the side
just to tie it all together to make it look fancy.
Look at that!
And I threw the books in to give them one last little test.
Make sure everything looked good before I put those ends on.
I'm not gonna lie, I cannot believe it.
I am da Vinci of furniture.
As I was gluing all this stuff together,
someone answered,
uninvited.
Hello?
- [Delivery person] Hi, I've just got a delivery for you.
- Yeah, I'll come down.
Can you hear how annoyed I am?
Uninvited! Who is this?
Anyway, it turns out it was a promotional delivery,
a smash cake.
Stop it, someone brought me a smash cake,
so I was pretty thrilled with it.
And I went back to gluing and throwing glue on the floor.
I am almost finished my TikTok bookshelf.
I'm so excited.
Obviously, I've got one thing I need to do,
which is smash a cake.
Ooh.
Oh my God, it's got their product in it.
Oh my God, it's full of skincare.
What a random,
what an unbelievable, ooh, that is nice.
Ooh.
Well, there you go.
Big shout out to They Skin.
Thank you so much for sending me a smash cake
for your products.
It's a brand new Aussie skincare business
that has only just launched, so good luck!
And also, shout out to the team at Smash A Cake
who make this cake.
They are an excellent team.
I've smashed many a cake from them before.
That sounded way more inappropriate than it should've.
All right. The very last step was to add some of this waxy,
polishy, varnishy thing that I bought from Bunnings.
I have no idea what it is.
There were so many to choose from.
I bought this one 'cause it looked good,
and it said it would give the wood a natural finish,
which is what I want.
And as I was putting on the polish,
I realized I probably shouldn't have used a dirty old sock
because some of the dirt was coming off in the polish.
But hey, it adds to the character.
It makes it look more vintage.
And, finally, I had to FaceTime my mum and dad to show them.
Keep in mind that I'm really useless.
- Okay, well, I've known that for a long time.
Oh - Wow.
- Nice.
- Oh, that's really interesting. What is it?
- It's a bookshelf.
- He's fitted all these books into it,
so they're all, oh, wow.
- It's a lot of timber for just six books, mate.
- I just need your approval, Dad.
- That's really cool, Christian.
- Thank you, mum.
- What happens if one of the books,
it's not gonna always fit.
- So it's custom designed for each book.
Only my book can and go into this slot.
So these are the books,
and this is how they have to live in there.
- So it's more of a display rather than a bookshelf.
- Think of it as a sculptural piece.
- Very, very nice.
- Thank you, Mum.
- Those bits of timber quite substantial, aren't they?
- Yeah, and I cut them.
- Can you hold both hands up for me to look at?
- What?
- I want to look at your hands.
Okay. That's one hand with five fingers.
The other one?
How did you devise the plan for that bookshelf?
- What a great question.
I came up with a completely on my own
just by watching a 15 second video.
- Oh.
It was like more of a work of art than an actual bookshelf,
that was the original plan, or did you change it?
- Well, no, it's a work of art bookshelf.
It's both.
- I gotcha, I gotcha.
- Is there anything else you want to say,
like, well done, great job,
congratulations, you're so skilled,
I can't believe you did it and you kept all your fingers?
- I think it's fantastic.
- Well done, great job,
you are so skilled, I can't believe you've done it,
and thank God you've still got all your fingers.
- Thank you, Dad.
Mum, I really appreciate.
I can always count on support from Mum.
I could've shat in a glass and Mum would've loved it.
Dad, on the other hand, I could've sawed my fingers off,
created a masterpiece, developed world peace,
and he would still be like, "Oh, yeah, it's not too bad."
- I just think that's a lot of work for six books, mate.
- [Mum] No, they're part of it. It's an art piece.
- Thank you, Mum.
Mum gets it. That's all that matters.
Okay, and we're done.