Bookshelves

This post might be an amusement to those out there who also have older homes.  Our house was built in 1900, and it is so beautiful, I just love it.  However, I think it’s often tough on Knut to get projects done because when you have an older house, nothing is simple.  Nothing.  You can’t just paint a wall, you have to refinish or gut it.  You can’t just replace a window.  You can’t just fix this or that.  Everything is a little harder with an older house.  It’s the bad that comes with the good.

As our family has grown older, and especially since we’ve begun homeschooling, we’ve become increasingly aware of our need for more bookshelves.  We had always intended to add another built in bookshelf to the den, to match the one Knut’s dad did several years ago when he owned this house.  The project got delayed because the fireplace took longer to finish than we had expected, and soon we were at the point where books were just literally piled around our house with no home of their own.  It’s really hard to clean when things have no place where they belong.  It’s a problem we’re slowly trying to solve in each room.

As the fireplace molding tripped up Knut a bit because the posts he used that were original to the porch of the house were slightly warped, this project had it’s own “fun stuff” to make it just a bit tricky.  You see, the ceiling is not level.  Contrasting that, we would actually like the shelves to be level.  Now comes the tricky part, making 2 things that are not parallel, look parallel.

As you can see, when Knut set up his level shelving structure, that the right hand side has about a 2″ bigger gap on the right side than the left.  To make the horizontal lines that don’t match up even trickier, there’s a wallpaper border in the room that follows the uneven ceiling, not the level bookshelves.  Knut’s mom put up this wallpaper border when she lived here, and we liked it so we left it.  We did paint the white walls this deep red to match the red in the border, and painted the back of the bookshelf area a tan.

The bookshelf Knut’s dad built is on the left, and the one Knut is working on when I was taking these pictures is on the right.  Knut tried to match up the curvy top piece that his dad did, and actually used that piece to make the optical illusion that it all fit together perfectly.

I’m so happy that the bookshelf on the left is no longer that messy.

Here’s the completed bookshelves with all of our school books organized on bottom.  I’ve started filling in the top parts with school supplies until the doors for the underneath cabinets get done this winter.  You may not be able to tell, but Knut had to very carefully slope the top board to make it skinnier on one side than the other.  He also had to slope the board against the right hand wall as that wasn’t level either.  Whew!

Aren’t my new bookshelves beautiful?  Sigh. 

The cabinets underneath have a spot for a small t.v. on the left, and school supplies on the 2 sections on the right.  I was digging in my heals a bit for adding another t.v. to our household.  As soon as Knut finished the shelves he was ready to go t.v. shopping, but I reminded him that until he gets the locked cabinet doors for the t.v. and the school supplies, it will likely get ruined very quickly at the kids’ level there.  In other words, I’m holding the possibility of a new t.v. hostage until I get my doors.  I’m no dummy.

A place for everything and everything in its place is a peaceful place to be.  I’m so excited now because this moved space around other bookshelves and tables and all of a sudden, I have space to store things!  Not everything is out in the open for Solveig and Elias to destroy anymore!  I’m now imagining a time in the future where each room in our house has such luxuries as proper storage.

I know it’s just a little bookshelf, but for me, it meant a huge burden lifted.