Here is a 'quick' progress report.
The Before shot: (We never usually remember to take these in our household!)
There are a couple of things to notice: The dodgy bridge between the two 6 foot bookcases that is drooping a bit in the middle. Super safe, I tell ya! I am a firm believer in extreme reading. Then there is the bookcase behind my bed, which is completely inconvenient for finding books (especially since they are packed on double), but extremely convenient for the reading light. I will miss that reading light, although I already have a plan... Watch this space.
And then the 'trashing the room' process began. In the beginning it was fun! And then I realised just WHAT I had got myself into. And putting that bookcase on my toe wasn't the motivator I needed either.
(That bookcase held my classics, old English, poetry and uni textbooks for the subjects I liked and/or still need to refer to for teaching. The bridge began my fiction books in alphabetical order (of author - do I need to add that?). The right side 6' bookcase and the white one on the wall continued with that. The little one behind my bed either hosted books that I am not a huge fan of, or books that I loved but were bought second hand donkey's years ago and look rather dreadful.)
So that part of the process took two days. Yes. TWO DAYS! I thought it would take two hours! I guess I misjudged that a bit. Although, as my biannual serious book-dusting job (I do less vigorous dusting roughly every two weeks) takes almost a week I suppose the penny should have dropped at some point.
Since the destruction of my room, my mom has been a champion, sawing the shelves and and putting together the base unit. I didn't want my books to go right down to the floor as they get dusty really quickly down there, and I feel that they are more likely to get damaged by the animals. I sound like I am obsessed with dust. I am not. I am obsessed with books. I would also prefer to spend my spare time reading and not cleaning, so prevention being better than cure and all that stuff, right!
While Mom was doing that, I was up the ladder painting the wall the bookcase is going to go on. I chose a dark colour. It is a brownish-pink, and a lot darker than it looks in the picture below. I also did the side walls for about a metre in an off-white shade of the same colour. (The rest will be painted when I can move further than a metre into my room.) I wanted the wall behind the books to be darker as I figured that a darker paint would make any smudges etc. less noticeable. I don't want to have to try and paint it in a few years and try and not paint the shelving. (I will spend a fortune on masking tape alone when that time arrives.)
So this is the base unit, before we screwed it into the wall. (It is now firmly attached and the doors stay closed. Yay!) That was a mission to fit, because my mom made it perfectly square, but the people who built our house had obviously not heard of the word 'square'. The walls actually banana in a curve and they put more plaster on the bottoms of the walls so the walls look to angle a bit. (No, it isn't going to fall down. Promise. It isn't noticeable with the naked eye, but put a straight piece of wood against it, and suddenly there is a problem.) It took us four days of fiddling and faffing to get it to fit. By then, mom and I were feeling rather tired and a bit fed up. (You know how you feel when it seems nothing will go right?) I should also point out that, in that picture, the wall looks a dang side smaller than it is. That portion is almost 3 metres!
In the mean time, I have been doing the rest of the wood. (I wanted it all sanded and varnished before putting it up, as it will be easier in the long run and I won't get paint all over the freshly painted walls either.) So this is what I have been doing.
Side note: When people ask for preferred winter reads, let me point out now that this picture was taken last week, in the middle of winter, at about 4pm. I don't 'seasonalise' my reading. I don't really have seasons. Winter is perhaps 10 degrees cooler than summer.
Going back to the topic: I have been painting and painting and painting, with a magnificent vanish, Woodoc. It isn't like the cheap varnishes out there that actually make the wood go orange. This brings out the buttery tones of the pine and, up close, they look like tigers eye (the stone, not the animal). The solvents in the stuff though, I have had it up to here with the smell. (My hand is pointing up high, very high.) I made a pun. Did you see?
With luck, tomorrow will be the last day of painting and then there will be THE ASSEMBLY. I can't wait!
So, I am guessing that, if you have read up to here, you might have a few questions.
Why on earth are my mom and I doing this?
Well, you have to meet my mom. She could have been McGuyver's mother. She can do ANYTHING! She does wedding cakes of the highest quality (she actually was taught a bit by the guy who did them for the royal family), she can do body work on cars, she can build, she sews (all my clothes as a kid were homemade and better than anything you could buy), knits... There is nothing my mom cannot do. She loves doing this kind of thing.
Then there is also a bit of a feminist thing to this. This is just one case. We bumped into a friend of my dad's when we were buying more sandpaper and odds and ends. He is a retired carpenter. (Also did amazing work.) When he heard what we were doing, although I know his comment was not meant maliciously, it was patronising. "We must give him tips." Really, he did it for a living for decades. What he was really saying was that we couldn't do it. But this is not the first project that we have tackled, nor was that the most condescending comment we have received by far. We are constantly being treated like idiots at the hardware store. In fact, I can count two occasions when we weren't. Hell, we have even had to go and find salesmen when it comes to powertools, because they just ignore us. Why can't we do this because we are women? Seriously?! So, because we are women, we are going to do it, and we are going to do it well.
Your next question, whether you are asking it or not, I am going to answer too:
What is a 37-year-old doing living with their mother?
Well, my dad died 3 years and 8 days ago. I moved back to help my mom out, especially since my grandmother lives here too, and she is 93-years-old and comes from the clan McLeod. It has added some complications (like the fact that I have, or more correctly, had, furniture and a kitchen and ... you get the drift; and that I was quite happy with having a lot of space.) Mom and I merged our stuff, took the best out the duplicates and gave the rest away to Animal Welfare's secondhand shop. We get along like the Gilmore Girls though, so this arrangement actually works really well. It also beats coming home to an empty house.
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