Supertrivial project of the day
Since the best and the bears are off in deepest Jesusland this weekend, I spent Sunday whooping it up by, um, cleaning the house. Around 11pm, I realized that my rearrangement of books and stuff was running into the small problem of not having enough surface area to put things on, so I stopped cleaning, went downstairs, and built this book and stuff shelf for the library. For some people, quality might be job one, but in this case quality is something around job 400; I wanted to get the shelf done today, so I could move some of the huge mound of railroad books off the top of the library shelves where they live today into a place where they might be more reachable. I started at 11pm on a Sunday, so I had to use, yup, you guessed it, boards from reclaimed pallets, and since I wanted to get it done before going to bed, I didn't bother with niceties like leaving the clamped joints overnight, but instead glued, nailed, then clamped the sides for about 45 minutes before gluing on the shelves and back slats. Picky things like quality construction, well, that's a nice idea, and I'm sure I'll think about it for the next project or so. But not for this one.
Exhibit A
The library bookshelves after five years of arranging around small children
Once upon a time, the library bookshelf looked like an actual bookshelf, with all of the books stacked vertically like you'd find in any normal house. This tidy state of affairs stopped about 35 seconds after Russell learned how to crawl, because the bookshelf was too tidy for our little pedestrian of the apocolypse. After a few rounds of "Russell will take down all the books and dump them on the floor, and then some bystander will pick them up and restack them", the routine was simplified to "the pedestrians of the apocolypse dump the books on the floor, and then those piles of books will be shovelled into the nearest shelf after the bears are coerced into bedtime." When you add to this our habit of placing breakable things up out of their reach by putting them on the bookshelf (you can't see it, but there's an unpainted HO scale class D locomotive on the middle bookshelf, right in front of the (broken, and no, I'm not sure why we haven't thrown it out yet) clock that's also been put out of the Baby Zone), and a formerly tidy -- if tidy is a word that applies to Chateau Chaos -- set of bookshelves turns like magic into a tall tottering structure that's just waiting for a big earthquake (this one doesn't count, even though it did wake me up Saturday morning) to cause all of my 100-or-so railroad books to eject themselves and crush whoever is sitting by the computer.
So, this weekend counted as the fullness of time, and by ~12:30 the bookshelf was all nailed and glued together and ready to be brought upstairs and stressed. I removed all the railroad books from the bookshelf...
Exhibit B
The library bookshelf after removing my railroad books
... and restacked them on the tiny bookshelf. Everything fit except for the wad of technical documents I've got on some of the proposals for trolley lines in Portland, which are left up on top of the tall bookshelves with all of my railroad magazines.
Exhibit CThe railroad books barely fit onto the new bookshelf
In case you're wondering, yes, that center strut is crooked. Even with copious use of carpenters square, I'm incapable of building anything that doesn't have at least one crooked part.
UPDATE:And after sorting, the formerly chaotic library shelves look tidier, if you don't get close enough to see that the science fiction (the lower 1/3rd of the ~700 books on these bookshelves. We've got a lot of books in Chateau Chaos; I'd be surprised if we didn't have 2500 books here, most of which are, by the mercy of the gods, not in the state of disarray that the ones in the library are) books are just shoveled in in any old order, because I didn't want to climb the mountain of sorting them (ditto for the mysteries, but since most of them were out of reach, they didn't get quite as disordered during the terror.)
Exhibit D
The bookshelves clean up nicely, but will they survive the Return Of The Babies?