It Leads To Fucking Carpentry

[Ancient History]

Fuck you, I love Bill Hicks too.

Anyway, I collect a lot of books. This ramped up as I started seriously amassing research material for my Mythos essay, and I had no shelves to speak of, so I started lining them up in Amazon.com boxes on the floor against the wall.

When I ran out of wall, I knew I had a serious problem.

So I bought shelves. Then I bought more shelves. More. I was doing pretty good on shelves at that point, but then I brought up all my books and graphic novels from Florida. That's like twenty document boxes. So I bought more shelves.

Now, my first five sets of shelves were lovely folding bookshelves from Pier 1. Because I was stingy and they were available, looked nice, worked well, and folded. I don't know why modularity is such a thing with me, but anyway.

Then I started buying barrister's bookcases. Because I could. Just to hold my nicer books. Arkham Houses all on one shelf, that kind of thing.

Now I have five of them.

If you've never seen a barrister's bookcase, they are the original modular furniture. Each shelf is a self-contained entity, with walls and floor and backing and a header bar across the top, and folding glass door in front. They were very popular with lawyers who had to move their libraries all the time, and I have always enjoyed the simple elegance and option of re-assembling my shelves Frankenstein's monster syle at my merest whim.

I bought the last set yesterday, and as I was disassembling it to pack in the car - and this is another nice thing about barrister's bookcases, I can comfortably fit five shelves plus header and footer in a fucking sedan without breaking anything - I noticed that the middle shelf had some severe damage on the backboard.

Now, keep in mind that this was practical furniture, yeah? The sort of shit your grandparents would order through the Sears & Roebucks catalog, that was knocked out in a factory to a formula and shipped off by train. So while it is still very nice and well-made furniture with more wood in it than the majority of today's particle-board crapola, there are parts of it which were made on the cheap and tend to age badly. And it gets knocked around a bunch.

So I stopped by Home Depot on the way back to the house and surveyed the damage in the parking lot.

As I said, your individual shelf is an elongated, open-ended wooden box. The floor is solid, the walls are solid, and the ceiling bar is very solid, a single piece of wood held in by big-ass nails. The backboard though, not so much. For this kind of "sectional bookcase" - it's a Macey's - the backboard isn't load-bearing, it's mainly there to be pretty. So you have an outer veneer that rests against the wall and is the consistency of birchpaper treebark, and an inner veneer with a bit of polish on it, and sandiwched between these two is a long, pliable strip of thin wood - maybe a quarter of an inch thick.

Anyway, the backboard has warped and splintered. The inner veneer was mostly still attached, but the back veneer had mostly peeled off, was warped, and about half of it was just missing.

Now, as a cosmetic issue, I should have let this slide. When stacked against a wall, it would have been imperceptible. It wasn't like there was any kind of bug infestation or wood rot that would spread, it was just old and warped, probably from sitting in a garage for too many summers and winters. But somewhere deep in my DNA a little spark flared, and I started cruising the aisles at Home Depot.

Now, I am not generally one for any sort of carpentry or home repair. I never took shop class in high school, I never had a parent or grandparent that knew shit about it. But the Build Shit Gene had been activated, and I was determined to make some small repair to this bookshelf before I put it up. And I had no idea how I was going to do it.

I started off in hardware, looking at the nails. Now, they of course did not have the round-headed black nails used to build this thing. They didn't even have anything helpfully called "carpentry nails." They were all glazed-this and wall-mount that. Hopelessly, completely lost in the mad technical world of fucking nails, and unwilling to ask for even the tiniest smidgen of help, I picked up a back of small, thin, dark brown nails.

Then I went to look at the hammers.

I experienced the same feeling examining that array of wood, fiberglass, rubber, and steel that I did when I first saw the table of halberds and pikes in the fucking Player's Guide. I had no fucking clue what differentiated any of them from the next, except that some especially shiny hammers right in rugrat-in-the-cart-grabbing range were the most expensive at almost thirty bucks a shot. I settled on a rather plain but functional wood-handled hammer, on the basis that it was cheap (and therefore if I broke it, would not be out too much money) and I hopefully couldn't fuck things up too badly with it.

Then I got a thing of wood glue. Again, I was faced with a vast array of thick cream-colored unguents, and those little bottles of thing brown varnish-type glues that take your skin off, and the assortment of glue-applying and un-applying accessories. I got a generic brand, and moved on.

Now for my third and final item(s), I had not given things much thought. Glue and nails are the primitive duct-tape of the carpentry world, and I figured I was set. But on the way out I passed a bin of big metal clips that were reasonably priced at a buck each, and picked up a couple. My mind was racing.

Back at the house, I unloaded my prize. Before I bring them in on the carpet, I lay each shelf, header, and footer out on a pair of bar stools (my impromptu sawhorses), and go over them with a white t-shirt destined for ragdom and a bit of cleaner. Spritz spritz, wipe away the dust and dirt and cobwebs, move on.

This time, however, I was fixing shit. So I made special note of any nails that seemed to be loose, peeling veneer, etc. Once I was done, I took the shelves needed my attention and began the operation.

The hammer and nails worked out fairly well. I pounded a couple loose nails in and that fixed one shelf. The middle shelf with the backing damage, I hammered a series of thin nails in to attach what was left of the backboard more securely to the base and walls. I lost a couple nails that went in crooked and broke off, but that was okay, and after a dozen nails it seemed much sturdier overall.

Then I made a mess with the glue. It was a thin line applicator and you really had to squeeze the bottle, at which point it just sort of sputtered and went everywhere. After much careful experimentation, I ended up laying the shelf glass-door-down on a couple t-shirts, so that the damaged back was facing up. Then I spritzed the glue liberally everywhere there was a crack, clamped the veneers to the backboard with the clamps, and weighted down the warped backboard with a couple chunks of granite I used as book stops.

The back veneer cracked and splintered a bit, and the glue bubbled and oozed under the pressure, and I had to use a t-shirt to clean it off the floor and all before it set. The footer was also in need of a bit of repair - the owner had it on backwards to disguise the fact that one end was coming off, so I poured a bunch of glue in the cracks and set it on end. Without anything else heavy to place on top and apply pressure, I settled on a large unopened bottle of laundry detergent.

I left it like that for the night, and the rest of the next day.

When I got home from work, I surveyed the carnage. Surprisingly, the glue held when I removed the clamps and the granite and the bottle of detergent. The back of the middle drawer was still warped and cracked, but much sturdier and more serviceable in my eyes than it had been before. So I set the shelf up (which required a bit of swearing, as it meant moving another already-loaded shelf over about six inches, which meant taking it apart and re-assembling it).

Now I bask in its glory, my tiny Build Shit genetic urge fulfilled.

Seriously though, I wish I'd learned something of carpentry as a kid, but if I had I'm afraid I'd be trying more ambitious shit than this. I'd probably try to build my own shelves.

[Maj]

What a great story. It sounds so much like what happens to me on a regular basis - I've learned all kinds of stuff just because I got into a snit about something.

Growing up, my mom urged us to try doing stuff like this because, "there are hundreds of people dumber than you making a living at it. It can't be that hard."

[Taishan]

The trick is not to be discouraged if it doesn't look 'professional', or if it took an ass-long amount of time to do. Practice is the key to both those issues.

[erik]

I recently removed a leaking portion of a waterline to my fridge and spliced together the remainder, and also took down some useless doors and screwed in an effective gate to keep my 2 year old explorer from getting behind/around the furnace and water heater. They weren't difficult projects but it feels good to fix or build things. I've done various repair work during my unemployment downtime as well. Next project is fixing the rumbling noise that just started happening in the dryer.

If my wife finds a job or if I upgrade into a decent job out of this call center schtick then I'll have funds for more interesting projects around the home as I've made a long list of things I'd like to do to our house over the next umpteen years over wildly varying complexity, effort and cost.


[edit:] I'm not posting anew since tis only a minor update...

But hey, I opened up the clothes dryer and fixed the noise causing element (dryers are pretty simple machines and not too many elements could have been to blame). I cut both my hands a wee bit on some sneaky sharp metal edges when closing it back up, but I'll heal and it feels good to fix things.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Barrister's bookcase? Good idea . . .

[Koumei]

Seriously though, I wish I'd learned something of carpentry as a kid, but if I had I'm afraid I'd be trying more ambitious shit than this. I'd probably try to build my own shelves.

That leads to digging out your own secret basement without planning permission, and we all know what happens then.

[Hicks]

Awesome bat caves and supervillian lairs?

[Whatever]

Not in Austria.

[Blasted]

...and definitely not in South Australia.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I should really do more with my tools than just making wooden sparring weapons. If I end up making a bookshelf as a result of this thread, I promise to post pics.

[Maxus]

I got my dad to help me rip the guts out of a wooden-cased TV one time. We put a shelf across the middle and turned it into a TV stand. Used it for years.

Then a cousin got married, needed some furniture, so it's at their house now.

[Grek]

I built and painted a table once. I keep my TV and spider cage on it.

[RobbyPants]

I'm lucky in that I have a father-in-law and a brother-in-law who know a lot about home repairs, plumbing, electrical work, and cars. They are my gotos for a lot of things.

I did pick up a lot of generic knowledge between renovating my last house (with the father-in-law's help) and finishing the basement in my current house. My wife and I felt confident enough to do almost all of that ourselves. She even checked out a book on how to do tile (which we'd never done) and we did a pretty good job of it.

There's a pretty good wealth of knowledge out there in book form and online.

[violence in the media]

The trick is not to be discouraged if it doesn't look 'professional', or if it took an ass-long amount of time to do. Practice is the key to both those issues.

This +1000. I always have to remind myself that it'll usually take at least as long to finish a piece as it did to design, cut, and assemble it in the first place.

[Cynic]

If you live in the States, home depot and lowes have weekly classes on different home repair places activities.

*edit: I don't know why I typed in places.

[violence in the media]

If you live near a Woodcraft store, they offer regular classes about how to use various tools (and retain all your limbs in the process) as well as technique classes if you want to learn things like specific types of joinery (like dado, finger, or dovetail), how to build cabinets, or carve various things.

I'd recommend going there over Lowe's or Home Depot if you're specifically looking for information about furniture repair and construction. Home Depot and Lowe's are great (as Cynic said) though if you're looking into general home repair and maintenance.