Books. Lots of Books.

The other big project of the last couple of weekends has been the Building Of The Shelves to finally make the library complete. As you undoubtedly recall, we decided to go with Effektiv shelves from IKEA, which means that they cost a lot more than the Billy's that we all had when we were in our 20's, and look quite a bit more solid, but still require assembly in just the same way that those cheap-ass ones did.

Now, I had grand plans of liveblogging the entire building process, which fell apart for a variety of reasons, one of which was that we ended up spacing the building out over two full days and then another partial day of securing the shelves to the wall and several days of unpacking books. And another of which was Halloween getting in the way of the whole thing. If I had liveblogged the whole thing, then you would have been subject to lots of entries like this:

1:23pm - K. and I just spent 10 minutes quasi-bickering about the pattern that the shelves should form. You see, there are two different heights of shelves -- the taller shelf actually consists of three small shelves, and the smaller shelf consists of one bigger shelf. Confused? So are we, and to be completely honest I remember that we decided to put them in the order low-high-high-low, but even now I can't remember if "low" referred to the smaller shelf unit or the small shelves in a big unit. Sigh. Now you see what K. has to put up with, and I acknowledge that my Ph.D. is not in either memory or shelf-design.

and this:

2:06pm - One of the (low/high) shelves is now finished as well. These are actually fairly easy to put together -- I am not sure if I just exaggerate the confusing IKEA directions in my mind or if they have improved since the last time I put together IKEA furniture, which was September 9, 2001 -- maybe this is just one of those things that has improved to prove to the terrorists that they cannot squash our spirit. Though I notice that there are not any IKEA's in either Afghanistan or Iraq or the caves of Pakistan that Osama is likely hiding out in. At least not yet. Now that Atlanta has one, I figure that Baghdad must be next.

and even this:

2:44pm - Putting together the tall one (with the short shelves) was a lot like putting together the others, if we were midgets. Everything was much bigger and required more hands to operate, so it was good fortune that this is when K. decided to join me, and we got it up in very little time. So far we have been interested in the variations in the colors between the shelves. When I first put together the plinth, it did not seem to be the same color as my desk, but these other shelves are closer in color to them. None of them are too far off, and all look like natural variations in the wood.

I know, I know. You are all crushed that you didn't get to enjoy that level of witty banter. Maybe someday we will liveblog another proect. Maybe we'll even jump into the next part of the 21st century, and videoblog. In the meantime, here are some photos of the whole process that you can print out and make a flipbook out of.















And the finished product, after many many trips carrying boxes of books upstairs (well, almost finished. There are still a few more boxes of books that will have to wait until we decide that we can afford another shelf for the side wall. But at least the patio is getting closer to empty. Well, other than the empty cardboard boxes we are now drowning in. But I digress):




Bonus points if you can figure out the organizational system on the shelves!