Building Bookcases
I was still pretty wound up about the work crap I discussed yesterday, in an "I don't feel like facing the world" sense, which kept me in bed until nearly 11 am. Finally, I dragged myself out of bed and planned my day.
Well, okay, my day didn't really need much planning; what I needed to do was draw up plans for the bookcases I wanted to build. Then I headed out and stopped at a comics store to pick up some odds-and-ends I'd been looking for; ate lunch at Culver's (a good regional burger place), and bought cat food. Then I went to Menard's (a regional workman's supply warehouse) and dropped a bunch of money on wood for the bookcases.
A few months ago, a friend of mine helped me build two large CD cases, each about 6 feet tall by 3 feet wide. They will last me a very, very long time. I've been more-than-out of space for paperback books for a few months now, and I wanted to build some new bookcases for paperbacks. I wanted to make them double-depth, with staggered shelves, so that each shelf would have another shelf behind it, above three inches higher, so I wouldn't have to pull books out of the front row to see what was behind them.
I bought aspen wood for the shelves, which is what we used on the CD racks. I thought about buying oak, but decided it was substantially heavier, as well as more expensive, but not significantly sturdier (it is nicer-looking, though, as I prefer a darker-colored wood). Turns out this was a good thing, because I ended up having to do a lot more sawing than I'd expected to get the wood into the pieces I wanted (I had to saw 12-inch-wide boards down to 10 inches, for instance, because they don't sell 10-inch-wide boards), and oak would have been much harder going.
The real trick was getting all the spaces between the shelves measured correctly, since I wanted to leave vertical space to remove books. This is tough when holding pieces of wood together before you actually nail them. Wood glue helps, but not completely. (It's also messy.)
I finally got one case put together after about 5 hours of sawing, measuring, and nailing. It turned out 95% the way I wanted it, though I failed the "measure twice because you can only cut once" test on some of the shelves and cut at a small angle, which looks a bit ugly. But not too bad. I estimate that when I get the second case done I'll have more than doubled my shelf space, using only slightly more wall space. Each case will be about 3 feet wide with 4 double-depth shelves.
It should go faster tomorrow, because I've already done some of the sawing for the second case. However, since I basically spent the whole time listening to the baseball playoff games on TV, I can't say it was a bad time. And after all the work, I don't feel nearly as viscerally upset about work.
Hammering is fun, too.
My arm and shoulder ache from all the sawing, though.
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