Gesamtwerk! uh....Gesundheit?

Da Vinci. Michelangelo. Shakespeare. Beethoven. Chumps, all of them. Why am I better than the masters of yore? Unlike this group of procrastinators I’m not dillydallying around before creating my masterpiece. No sir. Why bother with learning your craft before embarking on your masterpiece?

Dawn needed some customized bookcases for her library. We couldn’t find any bookcases that would meet our specifications. Dawn has a lot of books. But sheer book shelving capacity isn’t our only metric. We also require our bookshelves hold our books with style. Ye olde tower of horizontal shelves is not going to cut it. To my great woe, we were able to visualize what the perfect bookshelf solution should be, and we weren’t going to be able to find it in a store.

Now, a smart person might have contracted a craftsman of fine bookshelvery to create the perfect shelves. I say a pox to that plan.

Another route would be to simply learn woodworking, from scratch. Then build the large overly complicated shelves. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Of course it does.

Dawn designed her shelves. I’m not talking back of an envelope or cocktail-napkin designing either. Dawn sorted all of her books by size. Then she measured how many linear feet of each size book she owned. Next stop, a cad package, so dimensioned drawings could be produced. The result is an 8 foot by 4 foot behemoth that will hold her books with élan.

To get the complete mental image of the finished product you should know that Dawn’s library has already been painted terracotta orange, and these shelves will be backless so you can see the orange walls through the shelving system.

So, now that they’re designed they just need to be built. How hard can that be? Well, I’ve spent more hours in a 90° garage than I care to recall. I have no exact numbers, but I estimate that I’ve sunk more than 40 hours of quality time into this project thus far.

To show for my efforts I have this stack of bookshelf elements. I had decided at some point that if I broke the project into smaller projects, like a single shelf or a single vertical element, then it might not seem overwhelming. I could measure progress by each subproject assembled. However, I’ve pretty much run out of subprojects and am now faced with the task of figuring out how to fit them all together.

However, my persistence is starting to bear fruit. Elements of the bookshelves are starting to emerge.

I keep telling myself that there is light at the end of the tunnel. That I’ll have a massive bookshelf assembled in maybe another 20 hours of work.

However, that will only mean I’m done with bookcase #1, and the plans call for two of them.