Weekend Waste

Well, try as I may have done, a lovely new bookcase is NOT what you are seeing this morning.  But there is a reason why.  We had an ultimate project FAIL this weekend.  It's not something that anyone ever wants to have happen, but it does happen.  Read about our intention HERE.


This is the bookcase as it stood first thing Saturday Morning:

I was so excited to get this done that I was determined to squeeze it in during our super busy weekend.  First thing Saturday morning, before going to visit my dad, I unloaded the bookcase into the spare bedroom.  As you can see the Dean Koontz pile is rivaled (and dominated) only by the Stephen King pile.... 

Anyways, I took off the shelves, dusted them, brought the bookcase downstairs and put it in the garage.  My intention was to paint the bookcase, so I would have to go to Home Depot later to pick up paint.  So we left for my dad's.  In the afternoon, I had enough time to realize that the paint was not going to stick well to the melamine surface & that I should not attempt to paint it.  Because we would be putting heavy books on it, the paint would stick to the books & peel right off later.  So the goal was still to take the back faux-wood panel off, get some baskets and update the look of this shelving unit.

Sunday morning was incredibly busy, so when I got home Sunday afternoon, I immediately changed and went to the garage to tackle the bookcase.  Three-quarters of the way through the panel removal, the bookcase began to sway.  You have to be kidding me, this cardboard panel was actually giving this bookcase stability!  It was necessary.

Well I had torn the backing a little bit taking it off the bookcase, so I didn't want to have to put it back on.  I didn't want to add screws in the side, ruining the unit, so I thought, WAIT!  We can run out and buy a 1/4" thick finish piece of birch.  We can put it on the bottom half of the unit, where there is a fixed shelf, screw it in, and fix the stability problem.

Off to the Depot we went.  Unfortunately, there was no finished birch panel.  The only thing that they had in 1/4" was Luan,  which was red & didn't match.  So we would have to buy an $11 panel of luan & cut it, we'd have to buy a $11 can of paint, and what color to you paint this if you aren't painting the unit???  We would have to buy screws.... so here we would be spending $30 to fix a 10 year old $35 bookshelf.  It wasn't worth it.


So we went home, Matt and I reattached the faux-wood panel, I tried to glue the tear, knowing that books would be in front of it.  We took it back upstairs, reassembled it, added two new baskets that I had found for $8.50 a piece, put the books back on the shelf and called it a day...

What a waste.  Hours of work to unpack, dust, disassemble, reassemble & repack and the only thing that got done, was that the dust that had accumulated behind the unit was removed.  I suppose our allergies are happy.


While next weekend is a busy one, I hope and hope that we can actually get something accomplished.  Perhaps the trim and the walls, perhaps even getting a Kreg Jig & finishing our end table!!!


Have a great week everyone!