The Saga of the Bookcase

Fair warning: this really isn't a saga. I admit nothing and promise less. (But you should all be used to that by now...)

Anyway, as I've mentioned before, the War Department's office is also our guest room (as our friend from Toronto* found out over the Labor Day weekend). This means that in addition to her desk and files and whatnot, the War Department has to share the room with a rather large bed. There are also two large windows and a closet - meaning there is precious little floor space against the walls she can use to put a bookcase or even a chair. As a matter of fact, there aren't even that many walls on which to hang pictures or artwork.

The solution was to find a bookcase to hang on the wall beside the bed to give her a little extra storage and display space. The problem with the solution (oh, you knew this was coming) is that bookcases just simply don't come in the precise dimensions we wanted. Which meant that, if we wanted something that was nice and would fit where we wanted it to go, we would have to build it ourselves.

Fortunately, I actually have built bookcases (well, one) before, so once we had the overall size of the thing figured out, it was off to Home Despot to pick up the lumber.

Now, I COULD (and probably should) bore the crap out of you with all the little details about making the bookcase. In fact, maybe I will. After all, making it was something of an endurance test for me, so why shouldn't reading about it be just as much of an endurance test for you, hmm? Only without the distinct possibility of sawing off one of your fingertips on the table saw. Unless, you know, you were trying to stay awake.

Right, so, as always, the issues started with buying materials. In fact, there were several mistakes made when selecting the materials. First, I bought the wrong plywood. No seriously. I mean, I blame the War Department, at least partially, because she was with me and didn't notice that we were buying good-one-side plywood, rather than the good-two-sides that we actually needed. Not that it was THAT big a deal, really, it just meant more sanding, but what really compounded the mistake was buying twice as much as we actually needed. (Looks like I'll be building another bookcase at some point, I guess.)

Anyway, along with the plywood we bought some trim to finish off the face of the bookcase to hide the edges of the plywood. We bought the right stuff, at least... and too much of it. (So I guess the next bookcase will likely have the same trim? Yeah. That's it.) Again, I blame Amy - she knows I'm not so good at math.

Then we took all the materials home, put them in the garage, and left them there for a couple of weeks. You know, to acclimatize. Or something.

When I finally got off my ass long enough to get started, I drew a careful diagram of the pieces I'd need, realized we'd bought too much plywood, swore, and then set about marking out the pieces on the plywood. I made all my markings, set up the fence for the circular saw, double-checked the width of the saw guide, locked everything down, and cut the first piece (the largest piece) approximately 3/32 of an inch too short.

When I finished swearing, I double-checked to make sure the War Department hadn't heard me, and quickly checked all my other measurements to make sure that it would all still work. Fortunately, I had cut it too short - too long, and I would have had to start over with the back-up piece of plywood. So, good thing we had it, right? Right?

Anyway, the rest of the cuts went okay, although I had a devil of a time figuring out the placement of the shelves and had to measure everything about eight times before I got it right. You see, the design called for a 3-foot by 6-foot unit, 7 inches deep, with 9 little cubby holes. I really wanted everything to line up nicely, but because I had cut the first pieces too short, I had to recalculate the placement of the center shelves. (Heh, the best part is that I don't think Amy actually knows any of this yet. She thinks the shelf is 6" x 3", but it's actually closer to 71 5/8" by 35 7/8". Hee hee!)

Then I got to start putting it together:

Once the initial pieces were good and bonded, I could start adding trim:

And yes, the trim overlaps on the bottom of the bookcase so you can slide books off the shelves without having to lift them, It also helps to conceal the wood we attached to the wall to help hold the whole thing in place. I also added edge trim to cover up the faces of the interior shelves. Which, of course, was slightly bigger than the plywood and thus had to be sanded down.

Somehow I completely failed to take a picture of the sanding and painting process. Which is particularly weird considering how unbelievable tedious and lengthy the process was. I had to sand the whole thing with three grits of sandpaper, fill the holes, sand again, prime, sand the grain down again, fill the cracks and holes I missed the first time, sand again, paint, sand the grain down again, and then paint AGAIN. And then, of course, we had to figure out how to attach it to the wall.

But, and I say this with all due humility, I think it looks pretty damn good:

Yes, we probably overdid it with the brackets, but there will be people sleeping there some day. And not just friends from Toronto, damn it. People we actually like.**


*Hi Gillian!

** I kid. Gill's the absolute bomb, and the best house guest you could ask for. Seriously - I'll send her over. You'll like her. She's awesome.

Fumbling towards fall

Well, we FINALLY seem to have gotten some decent summer weather here on the Wet Coast. Of course, it's September, but who's counting? I'm going to go ahead and use that as an excuse as to why I haven't posted in six months (or however long it's been - I'm too hot and lazy to go check).

Actually, now that I think on it a little, that's exactly why I haven't posted in so long. Not the good weather, I mean, just that I am hot and lazy.

Mostly lazy.

Anyway, just because I haven't posted doesn't mean we haven't been busy. We just haven't done a LOT of work on the house - aside from gardening, lawn mowing, cleaning up cat puke... you know, the usual. I still haven't set up my office beyond getting my desk in and my computer working (read above re: hot and lazy), but the War Department's office is looking really good - one more thing to put up that will be the subject of its own post, I'm sure - and the garage is a little more organized than it was. We even found time to clamber up the side of Mt. Doug with a friend from Toronto one particularly fine afternoon:

We also made these, which was fun:

Tasty, too.

Anyway, nobody comes here to read about our cooking (and if you do, you're probably going to be disappointed when you ask me to post recipes and then I never get around to it because, well, hot and lazy, remember?) so let's get to the meat of the post, shall we? The end of summer means that we are running out of time to do something about the horrendous state of our sunroom and get it all buttoned up before the rain comes back. (In case you forgot about the sunroom, check it out here.) Fortunately, Mike - the guy who installed our floors - has recovered from a recent bout of cancer (wish I was kidding, but hey - he's doing really well now) and was looking for some minor projects to get back into the swing of things.

As an aside, can I just say how utterly tickled I was to hear that he thought rebuilding our sunroom - something that would take us an absolute minimum of six months to do ourselves - was a minor project? No? Well, never mind, then.

Our part of the deal was that we would be doing the demo work ourselves, along with the eventual refinishing of the inside, including drywall (Joy!), paint, trim, and tiling the floor. With the windows coming in supposedly this week, it was time we got back to work and started taking out the crap.

This crap:

Yes, we've been using the sunroom as something of a storage room / project staging area. It just seems to be the place where all the stuff winds up that doesn't REALLY belong inside, but probably shouldn't get rained on. Before we could find places to store all that stuff, I had to finish ANOTHER project I was working on that was taking up most of the garage:

And before I could even START that project, I had to finish this other one.

Maybe it might be easier to just tackle these in order, eh? Matter of fact, there's probably just too much for one post, so maybe I'll just pick one topic for this one, and do up another post for the next one? Who knows, maybe it might even force me to post more often, right? Is this too many question marks for one paragraph?

Okay, forget the sunroom, forget the other project, let's back up the train and start over. Man, this being lazy thing just leads to a whole lot more extra work, doesn't it? Makes me wish I'd listened to what my mother told me all those years ago. ("What was that?" "I don't know - I wasn't listening.")

Right, so, I mentioned a while back (I think I did - I went looking for the post and wound up editing six others and forgetting what I was looking for so you'll just have to find it yourself) that we had these windows in the upstairs hall that let in all this light in the morning. Given the angle of the windows and the positioning of our bedroom, the light streams right into our bedroom door. In the winter, it's not so bad, but at certain times of the year, that light starts streaming in right around six in the morning which is too damn early - especially if it's the weekend and you're trying to sleep in. Not that we EVER sleep in. much.

Now NORMAL people could just close their bedroom door at night, but NORMAL people don't have whiny-ass cats that howl if they're deprived of our company for more than five minutes while we're at home. Of course, we could also come up with a system of curtains to block off those windows, but they're impossible to get to, and I have no idea how to rig up a system that would allow us to open and close the curtains (without use of a remote control, which would be AWESOME) once we did install them.

Anyway, our solution to this was, I believe, not only ingenious, but a pretty clear example of what sets us apart from NORMAL people.

Here are the windows in question, coincidentally enough, at about 7:30am one fine Saturday morning.

And here is not only a perfect example of the light cutting right across our bedroom door, but also the solution.

Yes, we installed a cat door in our bedroom door. We liked the solution so much, we put one in the War Department's office, too.

Anyway, it's taken me so long to get around to finishing this post that the September weather has turned cloudy and grey, and I'm not nearly so hot anymore. Still pretty damn lazy, though, so that's all for now. Tune in later this week for the saga of the bookcase!