Saturday, October 15, 2011

Bookshelves

Anyone who knows Coz and I will know that we like books. Hell, Anyone who's passed me in the street on the way to work knows I like books. A fact probably much less-known is that I hate bookshelves. I don't hate them for what they do, I hate them for how badly they do it.

Most bookshelves are boxy things that are too deep - so you end up piling the books in in two rows, and can't see the ones in back. Or you just pile miscellaneous crap on the otherwise-wasted front of the shelf. And the shelves are too tall, so you stack them two rows high and then they collapse in a heap whenever you take anything out. And they waste all the space above the unit as a whole, while taking up more space than they need out from the wall. In short, they end up looking like this, which we just moved out of our bedroom:



I've been saying for half a year now that I wanted to just make my own, and last weekend I finally got to it. They're just pine, and they're a bit knotty, though straight. And the finish is a little rough, because I got some sawdust in the urethane. And the wall brackets are unevenly-spaced, because one of the studs was crooked. And I don't care; they're perfect:






They go floor-to-ceiling, and 10 feet across the whole wall. They're 8 inches deep, so they don't eat much of the room, and they alternate between just taller than a paperback, and just taller than a hardback. 100 feet of bookshelf, all for us! Apparently we don't own enough books... yet.