yesterday's progress report
Feb. 18th, 2010 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaYesterday's progress was great, if the subject to be considers is "home improvement". I've been needing one last bookshelf. We've got just slightly more books in the house than we had shelves, and so the shelves I picked up at Ikea for the hardcover books had lose books stacked at random in front of the books standing up. This is so not acceptable. I am one of those people who think that all of the books should be accessible all of the time, without having to move anything to get to them. The entry hallway in my apartment is kind of weird--the wall on the door side of the hallway is one width for part of the length of the hall, and then there is a slight jog and the wall continues a good 7 or 8 cm further away from the other wall, which, shortly thereafter, ends and the hall on that side opens up into the main room.
Therefore when I first went shelf-shopping I sought out a large shelf which just fits between that jog in the wall and the door to the bathroom. Needless to say, the wide shelf then projected into the hall space about 20 cm further into the room than the narrow portion of the wall. As a result I resolved to find or make a shelf which would fit just in the remaining space between the front door and the edge of the large shelf. Because of the dimensions of the available space (20 x 40 cm), I was unable to find anything appropriate at Ikea, so opted to build my own. I am so glad there is a local hardware store only a 10 minute walk away, so that I can go purchase the lumber and fixings I need and carry it home on one trip.
I opted to go with tiny angle brackets and nuts/bolts to hold the shelves to the uprights, so after taking the wood home to work out the measurements (28 cm from the bottom of one shelf to the top of the next shelf permits one to have seven shelves of hardcover novels (8 if you count the top of the unit) using 200 cm uprights) I then took the wood to uni and used the drill press in the lab to drill 64 holes I needed for the bolts (three times each, since I opted to play it safe and first drill 2.1 mm, then 3.1 mm, and finally the requite 4mm holes). (Note: as I got the wood home from the store, but before I started measuring the wood and marking the holes to be drilled, I had a call from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
clovis_t, who had been waiting at the airport for a flight to Scotland, which was running late--during that brief call he finally got his boarding call and so I wished him a safe flight and started working on the project.)
I first drilled the uprights and attached the tiny L-brackets (one hole on each limb), using a random scrap of wood placed across each pair of them to hold them in the correct position before tightening them in place. I then set the shelves against the brackets in place and marked the drill holes to match, numbering each board, since it is likely that even though I'd used the same gage to position the marks for the first holes they were probably all positioned ever so slightly differently from one shelf to the next.
Once the shelf boards were all drilled (and the back sides of all holes sanded smooth, I brought it all home. By that point nearly four hours had elapsed since I'd left uni, and I briefly considered doing my yoga and going to bed straight away and saving the assembly till the next day. Yah. Right. Like that was going to happen. 1.5 hours later the shelves were assembled, the hall floor swept, and the shelves stood into place and attached to the larger Ikea shelves to help keep them in place. (Note:clovis_t's text message saying that he'd made it to the bus (to take him from his point of landing, Glasgow, to his destination, Inverness) arrived about 4 minutes before the shelf was done and in place--it takes longer to build a shelf than it does to get from the Bergamo airport to the Glasgow bus station.)
I again briefly considered calling that good for the day and doing my yoga. Yah. Right, like that was going to happen--I was on a roll. Instead I started filling the new shelves. This is harder than it sounds, since I prefer my fiction to be organized alphabetical by author, but when we installed the Ikea shelves and emptied the boxes during the short and very, very full four weeks between the arrival of my boxes and my departure for the US for confrence/holidays we didn't take time to even organize the books by type, let alone author--instead we grouped them by height and adjusted the shelves so that each was as short as it could be and still hold those books, and even so there were more books than it would properly hold. As a result it took another hour 40 minutes to find the hardcover fiction and get it onto the shelf sorted by author (though I didn't take the time to organize books by a single author into a particular order). The new shelf holds most of the hardcover fiction (since I prefer paperback as a more comfortable size to hold whilst laying on my back reading, I have way more paperbacks), but I did need to overflow them onto the Ikea shelf. At that point it was closing in on midnight, and I'd been working for 8 hours (if you count the walk to the store to purchase the supplies), so rather than organize the rest of the books, I finally did call it a night, did my yoga, and went to sleep.
So, plenty of progress, but, alas, none on my uni work. Today we plan to download my most recent experiment though, so there should be progress on that front to report today.
Therefore when I first went shelf-shopping I sought out a large shelf which just fits between that jog in the wall and the door to the bathroom. Needless to say, the wide shelf then projected into the hall space about 20 cm further into the room than the narrow portion of the wall. As a result I resolved to find or make a shelf which would fit just in the remaining space between the front door and the edge of the large shelf. Because of the dimensions of the available space (20 x 40 cm), I was unable to find anything appropriate at Ikea, so opted to build my own. I am so glad there is a local hardware store only a 10 minute walk away, so that I can go purchase the lumber and fixings I need and carry it home on one trip.
I opted to go with tiny angle brackets and nuts/bolts to hold the shelves to the uprights, so after taking the wood home to work out the measurements (28 cm from the bottom of one shelf to the top of the next shelf permits one to have seven shelves of hardcover novels (8 if you count the top of the unit) using 200 cm uprights) I then took the wood to uni and used the drill press in the lab to drill 64 holes I needed for the bolts (three times each, since I opted to play it safe and first drill 2.1 mm, then 3.1 mm, and finally the requite 4mm holes). (Note: as I got the wood home from the store, but before I started measuring the wood and marking the holes to be drilled, I had a call from
clovis_t, who had been waiting at the airport for a flight to Scotland, which was running late--during that brief call he finally got his boarding call and so I wished him a safe flight and started working on the project.)I first drilled the uprights and attached the tiny L-brackets (one hole on each limb), using a random scrap of wood placed across each pair of them to hold them in the correct position before tightening them in place. I then set the shelves against the brackets in place and marked the drill holes to match, numbering each board, since it is likely that even though I'd used the same gage to position the marks for the first holes they were probably all positioned ever so slightly differently from one shelf to the next.
Once the shelf boards were all drilled (and the back sides of all holes sanded smooth, I brought it all home. By that point nearly four hours had elapsed since I'd left uni, and I briefly considered doing my yoga and going to bed straight away and saving the assembly till the next day. Yah. Right. Like that was going to happen. 1.5 hours later the shelves were assembled, the hall floor swept, and the shelves stood into place and attached to the larger Ikea shelves to help keep them in place. (Note:
clovis_t's text message saying that he'd made it to the bus (to take him from his point of landing, Glasgow, to his destination, Inverness) arrived about 4 minutes before the shelf was done and in place--it takes longer to build a shelf than it does to get from the Bergamo airport to the Glasgow bus station.)I again briefly considered calling that good for the day and doing my yoga. Yah. Right, like that was going to happen--I was on a roll. Instead I started filling the new shelves. This is harder than it sounds, since I prefer my fiction to be organized alphabetical by author, but when we installed the Ikea shelves and emptied the boxes during the short and very, very full four weeks between the arrival of my boxes and my departure for the US for confrence/holidays we didn't take time to even organize the books by type, let alone author--instead we grouped them by height and adjusted the shelves so that each was as short as it could be and still hold those books, and even so there were more books than it would properly hold. As a result it took another hour 40 minutes to find the hardcover fiction and get it onto the shelf sorted by author (though I didn't take the time to organize books by a single author into a particular order). The new shelf holds most of the hardcover fiction (since I prefer paperback as a more comfortable size to hold whilst laying on my back reading, I have way more paperbacks), but I did need to overflow them onto the Ikea shelf. At that point it was closing in on midnight, and I'd been working for 8 hours (if you count the walk to the store to purchase the supplies), so rather than organize the rest of the books, I finally did call it a night, did my yoga, and went to sleep.
So, plenty of progress, but, alas, none on my uni work. Today we plan to download my most recent experiment though, so there should be progress on that front to report today.
