The past weekend’s efforts at scrapwood Lego Botanical shelving were a rousing success, so much so that K asked me to make more, with an upgraded challenge: corner shelving. So I did my usual method (build first, measure later, hammer in pieces that don’t fit) and scrabbled together this effort. K was thrilled and excited to build more Legos, and I was rather pleased with the glitchy effect my total disregard for measurement lent it.
K mentioned that she wanted a shelf for her Lego Botanicals (aka: winter gardening replacement) collection but after toying around with the notion of well-made floating shelves, I got bored with directions and measurements and went with this little thing, Frankensteined out of pieces of scrap and failed drill press / jigsaw experiments during interior Shed construction and/or wordplay boredom.
A case study in why I prefer metalwork and welding to woodworking: I'm very much a "build first, measure later" type and the creative assembly (read: winging it) of something useful (or at least interesting) from otherwise useless and damaged castoffs was my little way of bringing my metalwork love to the extent of my woodwork tolerance. Fun little experiment – that K dug the end result (You can make more, right? she asked) made it all the more so.
And lo, more shelvings have been built.
Another wall of bookshelves built and brimming.
The first of 🤷 bookshelves are built and alphabetized, Abbott ➡️ McCarthy. Top two shelves were built by K’s grandfather, rest are my new additions. Slowly, slowly this project trundles on.
Far more enjoyable to build my own shelves than to wage war with instructions and dowel rods and another fucking allen wrench.
The shelves (and the curtain rods) and the treasures they house.
Treasures treasured.
Adore my PaintShop and its shelves of books and brain/soul food, its Dollar Store curtain rods of zip-tied carded action figures, its boxes of bagged and boarded comics from each of my collecting / procurement eras, then/now/in-between – love it but were I to consider the ideal (as I'm going to do now), I'd be surrounded by floor to ceiling shelves (ok, maybe one large wall open for original art and lobby cards for old horror flicks), dreamshelves, each tall and deep enough to hold everything from the smallest issue of isolarii to the burgeoning vinyl collection to the largest comics Omnibus / Absolute edition (or Ware's BUILDING STORIES - think that's the tallest but I'm not sure - that Taschen book on Magic is up there, as are the FAR SIDE and CALVIN AND HOBBES and NEW YORKER collections) and everything in between organized alphabetically by author and, most importantly, irrespective of the medium: vinyl between Blu-Ray Bergman doorstop boxsets and umpteen editions of HEAT and THE GODFATHER and MULHOLLAND DRIVE between books between bagged and boarded writers' runs on a particular comics series between Universal Monster VHS sub-organized within by year of release and, in the middle of it all, in the middle of a room wide enough to contain both these walls of dreamshelves AND toil upon both of its not-inconsiderable sides, KaijuDesk – or, hell, how about all four sides (it's called KaijuDesk for a reason) – spaced for optimal pacing and chair leaning underneath aforementioned and requisite Dollar Store curtain rods of ziptied action figures from on high like Mr. Choo-Choo's private car (though I wouldn't depend on them to prevent falling), memories and inspirations above and on all sides.
