A New Life for Some Great Shelves
One of the hardest things about closing the store was watching our beautiful solid oak shelving leave, a little bit at a time, knowing most of it would never do service in a bookstore again. It was physically painful, almost as much as watching the books go. Then, one day in mid-November, I got an email from a customer I also consider a friend and it made me laugh so much I can believe now that those shelves are making other people happy. With Jeannette’s permission, I’m sharing it with you—
hey, Lelia!
I’m glad to hear you’ve escaped from the Verizon vortex of doom. Speaking of vortices, I’m in a funny one and it’s your fault (sort of).
You will of course remember that Mom and I decided to buy one of your bookcases. Because of this, we have a new china closet/credenza, new dining room chairs and are currently installing new lighting in the kitchen and morning room. Not immediately clear? Let me explain…
Mom decided that we had to paint the wall behind the new bookcase before we installed it in the foyer. Therefore, we had to get rid of the old shelving unit, which meant we had to find someplace to put the stuff that was in that unit. So I boxed it up and set it aside. Then Mom decided that we would also have to paint the (cathedral) ceiling in the foyer before the new shelves went in. I didn’t want her on a ladder and I didn’t have time to do it, so I decided to hire someone to paint the ceiling. Well, if someone was going to paint the foyer ceiling, he might as well paint the rest of the (cathedral) ceilings in the living room and dining room and, while on the ladder, do the kitchen, morning room and hallway ceilings too.
That having been done, Mom thought it made sense to paint the nearby walls in the morning room, one of which was covered by books on unfinished shelves. Well, if I had to box up all those books and take the shelves down, I might as well finish the shelves. So I did. We painted the morning room walls and put the books back up. But now I had nowhere to put the non-book things (mostly vases) that were in the foyer shelving unit (’cause it had cabinets and yours were straight shelves). Where do you put vases? In a china closet, right? So, out of curiosity, I decided to look on eBay for a china closet that would match Mom’s Danish modern design theme, not expecting to find anything… except I did, so Mom decided to buy it, but we lost that auction, and I got mad, so I kept looking, and we found another, better china closet/credenza, which is being delivered next week.
While I was looking for the china closet/credenza, I ended up doing research on the table we were trying to match, and the eBay search kicked up matching chairs. They arrived on a Greyhound from Illinois on Saturday. Now I have four new chairs and no place to put them, so the Florida room had to be cleaned out, and lots of stuff has gone to our local Christmas Mother’s shop.
Back to the kitchen… while painting the foyer, we realized that a light shade was broken. We went to Home Depot to find a replacement, and saw the track lighting that we thought would be perfect for the kitchen (which is semi-circular and a #$%^&! to light), and it was very inexpensive, so we bought it, and came home and called the electrician and asked him when he could install it. (I don’t do water or electricity. Paint, yes; carpentry, yes; water or electricity, no.) He said, You don’t want that, I put it up in my kitchen and I hate it, come to my house and see for yourself. So we did, and he was right, and we went with his suggestion of recessed lighting with mini-pendants over the morning room table, and he starts the installation tomorrow.
I neglected to take any “before” pictures, but I will send you an “after” picture. The downside of all this is that Mom says we can’t afford any more books until next year. Which is just as well because I have to build shelves on the other wall of the morning room.
Mom says thank you for her renovations, and please don’t move again.
December 20, 2009
Posted in: Tales of a Bookseller
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One Response
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!
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