Further adventures in woodworking

This last weekend had a lot going for it. There wasn’t a heat-wave in progress. I wasn’t feeling ill. It was a weekend we were at home. As such, I actually got some work done on my labor or love, the bookcases.

It’s been so long since I last got a chance to work on them due to illness, temperature, school, traveling, etc, that most of my seething hate for the project had subsided. In fact it was actually fun again! More importantly, I was able to evaluate my progress with a clear head and realize I was at a pretty important decision point. Most of the atomic parts of the first bookshelf have been assembled. There are a few connector pieces missing, but those have mostly been purposely postponed to make sure they are cut to fit the actual bookcase, not the one that only lives on paper.

After surveying my work-to-date I came to the conclusion that I might need to make small change to my plan. The original plan was to build a huge, free standing, backless, bookcase of Dawn’s design. I was at the point where I could just start assembling all the pieces and see what happened, but I beginning to have my doubts about free standing. Free standing seems unnecessarily risky. What happens if I get all the pieces together, and to spite all my careful measuring, my workmanship shows through and the errors all add up? The whole thing might be a wobbly, or worse yet, too dangerous to put books on. This thing is going to be of considerable size and weight and I don’t want Dawn crushed in an unfortunately bibliophile related accident.

The safer course of action seems to be assembling the bookcase in components. This will entail first assembling the outer frame (the two sides, and four major shelves) and attaching it to the wall. Once the outer frame is in place and secure I’ll go about filling up the outer frame Tetris-style with the remaining components. The advantage of this approach is that if any single area is too far off I’ll just have to replace that one section instead of the cursing and swearing and tearing apart the fully assembled bookcase with my bare hands. The probability of overall project success seems more likely, which is a good thing. If these bookcases don’t work out I think a little part of my creative soul might die.