Ah, gentle reader, it has been fifteen years since I posted about a gallery of the Noggle library, and this post is not going to revisit the state of the library. However, I do want to note that the brown, unfinished shelf that housed the woodworking books and magazines has come in doors.
In 2010, it looked like this:
In the decade and a half since, I am not sure I’ve acquired many repair guides, and if I did, they went to the unread stacks. But I did load it up with junk for craft projects that I never got to I haven’t gotten to yet.
But I’m now into year two of cleaning my garage, and I had picked up a plastic shelving unit for use in my office where it didn’t fit (my PCs didn’t fit on it in a fashion where I could have moved my printers under the desk), so I moved it to the garage in the middle of the garage. That made it look junky, so I decided to bring the bookshelves into the house–into my office–and use the wall space in the garage for the shelving.
Well, first, I had to paint it, of course.
The bookshelf has an interesting family-by-marriage history. My maternal grandmother remarried a fellow named Herb when she was in her fifties (old, I would have thought then–given she had only a few years to live, I guess it was truer than I knew). Herb was a woodworker by–hobby? Vocation? He had a professional wood shop that he gave up when they married, and he tricked out the lower level of the house they shared on the flood plain until it flooded, and then he tricked out the basement of their next rented house not on a flooded plain (and the house where my grandmother died–and the last time I saw her, I was so into my new library books that I read in her living room instead of spending time with her while she was bed-ridden–I never knew how sick she was). But Herb did not build this bookshelf.
One of his five or six children built it as a china cabinet in high school shop class. It was not a bad piece of schoolwork from fifty years ago; it’s made of solid wood, which puts it above most of our bookshelves which are particle board and laminate. My mother inherited it when my grandmother died, and I remember it on the exterior wall of her dining room–but when I went to show my beautiful wife a picture of it as a china cabinet in a photo of our family having dinner at my mother’s, it’s not there. Maybe it was on the interior wall of that dining room.
Sometime, I got possession of it; I don’t actually remember when I got it, and that bothers me a bit. I don’t think it was when my mother passed away– I did not take much of her furniture, leaving it along with the house for my brother to deal with. It might have been after my first aunt passed away, at which point my mother probably inherited a nicer china cabinet from her sister.
I say this because when I got it, I took the doors off and removed the center pieces of it to turn it into bookshelves. And I sanded some of the paint off of it. This would indicate I got it pre-children, back when I thought I would get into refinishing furniture (which I really didn’t–which is why the hardware for one of the desks in my office is packaged in the garage–I planned to refinish it 26 years ago, but I have not gotten to it yet, and it’s been in use for probably 24 of those years). When we moved to Nogglestead, it was put into the garage, and there it’s sat for the sixteen years we’ve been here.
Well, I did not stain it, but I painted it with leftover fence paint, and it’s in my office now.
It also has the distinction of combining reference material (the woodworking, home repair, and electronic repair books), books I’ve read (the paperbacks at the top), and books I have not read (things I had stacked horizontally atop the other bookshelves in my office). I’d thought I’d need it for the overflow mass market paperbacks I’d read, but the overflow did not take up much space on it. So I have commingled read with unread. But not my books with my beautiful wife’s books (I say that as though it’s a taboo, but some of the books from my childhood are mixed with her books in the family room).
I stacked the former read paperback shelves atop each other, and the three shelves together eliminated some of the only wall space available in my office for decorations. So the few of my mother’s spoon collection which I actually polished at one time and displayed in a hanging spoon collection display thing-a-ma-bob–well, they’re on my desk again, suitable for a five things on my desk post again. I’ve kind of leaned the other things from that wall–the Jordan Binnington print, a couple of woodburnings I’d given to my aunt and uncle which I got back when my aunt died, and a couple of small paintings that my great grandmother did and which I remember on the wall in the dining room in the house projects–atop the bookshelves.
But there’s no room here for the spoon collection. We’re actually getting to the point at Nogglestead that we don’t have vertical wall space for the things we’ve accrued, so some are in the garage, and some will be in the storeroom.
At any rate, that’s the story of this particular bookshelf. Which is the only heirloom-quality bookshelf we have, actually.
“I hope you like the color,” I said to my wife. Because we have five or so gallons of brown paint left.
And onto the next project: Which is cleaning and organizing the garage, and maybe finally refinishing/staining the coffee table and end tables which my brother gave me in 1999 or 2000 and which I took apart to stain evenly and which we have moved, disassembled, several times. Who knows: When the garage is finally cleaned up enough that I can get to things and that the floor is not covered with boxes, bike carriers and trainers, and donation piles, maybe I’ll get back to actually doing things in it.
Or maybe I’ll wait for 2040 to get around to it. Time will tell.
