(no subject)

[which_chick]

I had a nice day at work today, relatively productive and stuff plus also I got two free not-acceptable bookshelves made out of mostly-real-wood (there are chip-board backs to them but I can remedy that in short order with my cat's paw. [It's a pry-thingie, not a part of an actual cat.]) that I am going to disassemble and remix into more acceptable shelving units for my CD collection, which got bigger today by three CDs of music they don't play on the radio here.



Because they are *wrong*. Allow me to illustrate.



This is a picture of the bookcase at the end of the hallway. (It's custom, solid maple, made of *nice* boards without knots in them. I had a woodworking guy come in and measure and then sketched him what I wanted it to look like. It is absolutely the right thing and I like it every time I see it. It was not, however, cheap.)



This is a picture of the shelving unit I built for my DVDs. It's narrow because it was designed to fit beween the end of the wall and the sideboard, backing up against the fridge to cover the naked part of the fridge-back (the kitchen isn't big enough for the entire fridge to be backed against a wall). It was inexpertly made of not-exactly-straight real wood boards and as a result, it is significantly cheaper (a hundred times) than the hallway bookcase. I painted it dark brown (matches the painted trim in the room where it lives) to cover up the fact that the boards (which were free) used to be a minty dentist-office green.

So. You have two examples of satisfactory shelving units.



This is one of the two (they match) free-but-unacceptable shelving units. Can anyone in the class explain what is wrong with the shelving units BESIDES the chipboard thing? Clearly, the chipboard must go, but there is another problem, here. What is that problem?

Comments

[cassandramorgan.livejournal.com]

I will take a stab at what is wrong. And since I don't know all them fancy words for things, I will try to say it in somewhat plain English.

The shelf part is not one solid (thick) piece of wood. It is either a (still not particularly thick) bottom piece with a thinner top piece nailed onto it OR it is the thin top piece with the edge of the 'thicker' piece, which makes it appear as if it is a thick piece of wood but in reality is nothing more than an edge piece.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

The dumb little strips of wood on the shelves are *also* a problem, but they would not, alone, cause me to disassemble and rebuild the shelves. Cousin Sue nailed my primary issue in the next comment...

[cassandramorgan.livejournal.com]

Ah...I just stack my CD on top of each other if there's a lot of space between the shelves. Since "putting CDs on a shelf" means "get them the hell out of my way" to me and I don't usually use the actual physical CD, it never would have occurred to me that that would be a problem ^_^

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

It is an inefficient use of space for cds, as cds are smaller than the height of shelving allotted.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Yep. The primary difficulty with the unacceptable shelves is that they are too far apart. Shelves should only allow about an inch, maybe two, above the thing-being-shelved.

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

Which is a cheapazoid trick by the shelving companies to use less wood. Cheap particleboard shelves always seem to assume that you need to shelve two-foot-high items.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

These look, actually, like they're someone's wood shop project. They're stained and have the finishing details (the milled strip edges that irritate me, noted by cassandramorgan) you might expect of that sort of thing. The materials are cheap (#2 boards and the chip-board backing) but the construction isn't terrible. The edges are more square than I generally manage and they're pretty solid shelves.

They're afflicted with the two-foot shelf problem, but they don't *look* like a commercial project. A modern commercial project would be either made of plastic-veneer particleboard or made entirely of nice REAL wood but in either case, it would be shelving with adjust-a-pegs for the shelves. (I hate the adjust-a-peg shelving. It's a personal thing.)

Modern commercial projects are not generally made of cheap, #2 (large, visible knots) real wood. If it were possible to buy real wood shelves in an "inexpensive" grade, I would already be doing it. That product isn't around anymore. What we have now is "made cheaply to look expensive" and "made expensively to look expensive". Our modern society has moved shelving units beyond shelving units to fashion decorating items. I just want to be able to keep my CDs so that my cat can't keep knocking the towering stacks off the fucking endtable.

[brni.livejournal.com]

of course, once the shelving is properly shelved-thing-size spaced, visibility of the chipboard will be minimal, especially if you populate that space with plush cthulhus and shoggoths and tribbles and such.

personally, i really like the look of crappy, knotty pine. pity i have neither the time to make any of that stuff nowadays, nor an appropriate workspace. (unused band room or unused workbench? bandroom won)