Limited Shelf Life II

Here we go!

Phase I is here.

Since the side pieces have dadoes cut to hold the shelves and run from top to bottom, I figured a level brace supporting them would give enough support. We shall see. When I went into our wood scrap stash, I assumed I would rip down 2x4 or 2x6, but then I spotted this piece of brick mould left over from the front door project. I just had to sand the paint & primer off several inches off in order to get enough to do both sides.

Even after Eric pushed up the sagging sides of the end sections while I attached the cleats, I wasn't satisfied with the change in the center section. So I located a couple of ceiling joists and screwed the upper piece into them which made a satisfactory difference.

That's right, the ceiling in there is a bright, apple green and that is my doing. I loved it and still do, but as we've been changing the decorative vibe in there it's become not-right. I have a plan for that...

After this was done, I just couldn't not add one last thing... a finish piece of moulding at the ceiling. I was tempted to add some screen moulding at all the seams where the wood butts up against the drywall, but I controlled that urge. This piece I did not have in our stash. Silk purse from a sow's ear and all that. The shelves are pine that was probably only oiled at one point in the past and that has been oxidizing and exposed to UV for however many years while the quarter round moulding is hemlock that was probably milled fairly recently by comparison. So, they don't match. I got them a little closer by putting a quick coat of clear varnish on the quarter round and that's all I feel like doing. I'm not saying the idea of painting the front of the whole bookcase didn't occur to me, but I am saying that I'm not going to bother.

Yup. It's both lighter and pinker.
And yup, I decided to hand nail it up rather than dragging the super heavy air compressor, hose, and pin nailer across the ice rink of a driveway for 5 or 6 nails. I am NOT good at hand nailing, but it worked out good-enough.

One admittedly foreseen side effect of shifting the shelves is exposing former paint colors. Luckily, in most cases these will be covered by the shelves' contents. Another thing that's not as good as we had hoped is that we weren't able to hoist both sides all the way to level. The right side is still leaning towards the center, but not as much and hopefully it should at least be stable now.

At least the colors aren't strikingly different!

Not much prettier, but hopefully much more stable and secure. I did decide that I could style the bookshelves a little better, without reducing the storage capacity by much. Well, I found a new home for a few non-books and even brought some books in from other places and have room to spare! There will always be more books. In fact, I would guess that is really only about 10-15% of our books, anyway. Oof.

This was taken before adding the quarter round to the top. You can see the sag has improved.
The lower, right shelves are mostly books that could be read or flipped through by an overnight guest. Comics, short stories, essays, pop-ups, novelties, and photo books. Some goes for the shelf above the wifi router on the left. 

In the midst of this, I remembered that Eric has acquired some neat items associated with his authoring, but that we only have an ad hoc display of them. I started trying to figure out what we can remove or rearrange to make a space specifically for displaying them. It's the middle shelf on the right there. There are some more things coming to that shelf in the next couple month, so stay tuned for some close-ups! Anyway, it's not the same as if Eric had a dedicated writing space, but he does sometimes write at the fold-down desk in the guest room. Mostly he does it at the dining table.

Hopefully, in the next week or so, I will address the wireless network crap on the bottom left shelf and tune up the center section.

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I'm super pleased that this project has been accomplished using mostly things from our supplies stashes. At this point the only thing we had to purchase was 10' of 3/4" quarter round moulding of which I used 9' 5.5".

     OUT OF POCKET COSTS (to date):
     $5.70

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NOTE: We realize that storing books stacked on their sides isn't the best way. We hope this won't be in place more than a couple-few more years. Hopefully it is less harmful to paperbacks, because most of those stored that way are paperback.