(no subject)

[which_chick]

This morning I did not get the oil changed in my car. I suck. Probably the engine will fall out here directly. I've put oil-change on the to-do list for next week. Perhaps I can get it done then.

I did measure and cut (circular saw action!) the boards for my shelving project, though. I am in need of shelving for my DVDs because they are now stacked high enough on the sideboard that it's a hell of a mess when the cats knock them over. On the off chance that I might be able to find something commercially-available that would suit, I went shopping for shelving when I was out helping brother Joe move law offices. None of the reasonably-priced bookcases were sufficient unto the task because they were all made of that chipped pressed sawdust crap. I can't be having with that. I also don't have a couple of hundred dollars to invest in real-wood bookcases particularly since those all come with peg-supported shelves (hate!) these days. Also, nothing was the proper width for where I wanted to put it.

So, y'know, I embarked on the shelving project. I had boards handy because we'd gotten them when we foreclosed on a used bookstore. They are boards with entertaining senses of humor. They are boards that came with lots of free, mint-green paint on them. (I have removed the vast bulk of the free mint-green paint using methyl-ethyl ozone-dissolving badshit, which was good practice for the upcoming refinishing of the dining room table. It's nice to be able to learn how to strip paint off of free pine boards before you go stripping the finish off of your forty year old solid cherry dining room table that's actually worth, y'know, money.) At any rate, I do understand that it will be more than a little interesting to attempt to build a reasonably square structure out of these boards, but I'm going boldly forth just the same. The most interesting part of this morning's work was the discovery that my cats, who are terrified of the vacuum cleaner, didn't even move for the circular saw. (I circular-sawed in the middle of my living room. When you live alone, you can do stuff like that because there is nobody to complain.)

I also marked the locations for the screw holes on the uprights and secured the boards for uniform drilling by... duct-taping them together. I will be making a template for drilling the cross-pieces out of paper when I get home tonight, so that I can do those all the same. And then there will be the drilling of holes. After that, assuming I haven't lost any body parts to my power tools, I will assemble the damned thing and determine if it needs to be braced along the back so it doesn't collapse diagonally.

After that? Sanding, painting, drying, sanding again, painting again, drying again. Using. At least, that's the positive outcome. The negative outcome is that I take it outside and make it into flinder-sized pieces for starting fires in my woodstove. Win or lose, I'm out the cost of a smallish box of wood screws (from WalMart), a plastic scraper thingie (WalMart), and two sets of sandpaper (WalMart). Everything else was stuff I already had or scrounged from sympathetic family members. Call it twenty bucks. The cheapest, ugliest real-wood bookcases started at a hundred and twenty dollars.

Plus, this way I get to play with power tools.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Er. Have fun getting sawdust out of unexpected places for the next three months or so. Back when Quest Labs doubled as an illegal woodshop, we generally kicked Doug and/or whoever Doug had talked into helping [me] out onto the balcony or out the front door onto the patio for the cutting-things-up parts of projects. This is part and parcel of why we were eventually instructed, on pain of eviction, to shut down the illegal woodshop.

Come to think of it, we also did the painting-things-black-at-midnight out on the balcony and/or patio. Somebody knew better; I don't think it was me - I was a thoughtless, feral fanboy in those days...

Mitch H.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I don't worry overmuch about sawdust. I heat with wood, which makes dust and cruft. I maintain two cats, who track litter all over and *shed* and *barf* and kill rodents and strew their corpses all over hell and gone. (Is there a current tense of strew? Strow? Straw? Help me out, here.) A little sawdust isn't going to make much difference. Besides, I swept up the big hunks.