The Unboxing Continues
Sep. 11th, 2020 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aTuesday, my dad and I finished the bookshelves we've been working on much of the year and installed them in the closet in my office.
This was a long, long process because it was interrupted by the initial COVID lockdown, and then by them by them settling in some new (quarantined) renters from New York, and then by us going to Oahu .... it's been that sort of year.
When my dad had initially suggested that we build these shelves that I wanted for my closet, I'd thought that we'd just knock together a dozen or so pieces of wood, like we had for old bookshelves that we'd built for previous residences (mostly donated to Uhuru Furniture before we left), but instead he'd had in mind making real furniture, and that's what we did.
We cut, then we attached real wood onto to the front of the plywood to give the shelves a nice facade. And we glued and attached and sanded and routed and filled screw holes and stained and finished. And there we are half a year later!
And I have to agree, they look quite nice, like real furniture.
Oh, except there was one final step after we thought we were done. We'd installed one of the shelves in my office closet and I put the Bronze Age Omnibus by Jack Kirby on it, a 1400-some page hardcover book, and my dad didn't like the way the shelf wobbled, so we ended up cutting strips of wood to back each of the shelves (and stained and attached and finished those).
So after we finished things last Tuesday, we finally did another project, which was install a new fan in our living room.
The old one made scary, wobbly fans when run on high, and that particularly disturbed my dad, and we got to calling it the death fan.
So we'd picked up some new fans last week, and we installed that first one on Tuesday ...
And now at high speed it makes slightly less scary, but still kinda wobbly sounds.
We've got an identical fan for the dining room, so we'll see what it does, because if it doesn't do the same thing, there's something wrong with our first installation (or the fixture).
Meanwhile, this left me the task of filling that bookcase, in a closet that had been mostly unused since we got here. (OK, honestly, it was starting to accumulate junk, so it's good we got in there before it became unsalvageable.) I set to it with alacrity, and spent somewhere more than half a day of work on it between Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday. I went through about 30 boxes of graphic novels and omnibuses (which had to be re-merged, since they'd been placed in different boxes for sizing) and pretty much entirely filled the closet.
I've got 3 boxes that I never opened, and maybe 192 quarts of books that I unboxed and couldn't fit. So I guess they're not all going in the closet.
I looked some to see if there was more that I wanted to cull, but the answer was, "Not at this time". I culled a lot in Berkeley. So, some of the comics will have to go in the less friendly environment outside of the closet (which has a dehumidifier).
At the moment I've got Marvel on the left shelf, DC and Vertigo on the right shelf, and Valiant overhead, alongside a lot of books to read. And everything's is tightly packed, so there's no room for growth. That means that mostly "indie" books will have to go outside of the closet, plus I'll have to figure out how to manage growth within the closet itself.
I've got my eye on a stretch of wall just to the left of the closet for the rest that should keep everything nearby (unlike in Berkeley when the comics were stretched across at least five different shelves (perhaps more) in three different rooms. It'll be nice to have everything together, and what I've got is already better organized.
One unfriendly discovery: our packers were crap at packing comics. In the first box of graphic novels they packed, I literally found one bent into a "U". Generally, they tossed graphic novels in haphazardly with no attention to their pages interleaving or things bending them. In all I think there were slightly less than 20 that they damaged to noticeable levels out of 3 boxes they packed. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I found maybe half-a-dozen I'd damaged out of 30 boxes. That's a big difference.
Fortunately, the graphic novels they packed fell into two categories: things I read in the last few weeks before they showed up and things that I'd planned to someday replace with sturdier omnibuses. The majority were the latter, and so that was most of what they damaged. About a dozen books that they messed up had in fact been replaced in the last 10 months or so, so those were unfortunately just thrown out.
I am so, so happy that I packed the majority of our books myself (and was sending new purchases on to my dad by October or so).
After unboxing all those graphic novels, I had a family room full of boxes, which I broke down last night and today.
Then today there was a mighty pass around Eleele and Hanapepe getting rid of stuff.
Talk Story got another two armfuls of graphic novels that I'd replaced since they were packed (also allowing me to support the only book store on the island, which is pretty important right now).
A ton of cardboard got recycled near Salt Pond (though curiously the actual beach was blocked off by police cars and a helicopter seemed to be regularly picking up water).
Some stuff from Kimberly got dropped off at Habitat for Humanity.
And I tried to get some new Sterilite tubs at Ace Hardware, but they just had what looked like a lower quality brand, and which wouldn't have matched what I already have. (Which might have been OK, but I didn't have the precise measurements with me to fit on the shelves in the garage).
It was weird making the run out to Salt Pond and Habitat again, because I was doing that a bit in January and February and March, and then when the Shelter in Place occurred at the end of March, that stopped.
It was also my first time either into Hanapepe proper or Talk Story since we'd moved.
(And I say it was a "mighty pass", but it just took an hour. Thanks, Julie!)
So, I've still got some graphic novels that need to be re-stored, but otherwise the great graphic-novel shelf project is done and our house is that much closer to being a normal home, both for the removal of 20-25% of our remaining boxes, and for recreating my graphic novel library.
(I was really thrilled to have them back, and have already started reading some of the stuff that had been in storage.)
Oh, and I've figured out at least two graphic novels I'm missing, which suggests to me that there's still some unboxed — stuff that I read in July and August according to Goodreads, which probably means it ended up in a weird box, after I'd packaged its brethren (but thankfully I read them before the graphic-novel-murdering packers got there). That probably means I should unpack the last three graphic novel boxes into Sterilites when I get more (hopefully at Home Depot next Monday or Tuesday) and maybe get it all better sorted.
When we were walking a few nights ago, my dad mentioned that the shelves had taken quite a long time and queried if we wanted to do more or not.
I've had fun working on the project with him, but I'm also entirely happy to pay someone to work on the rest of the shelves we need, so we talked about it a while until I could assess that indeed he felt like we'd done enough.
So right now we're waiting on a quote that Kimberly has out to replace the old, sticky, sunfaded curtains throughout the house, most of them hung from very classy PVC pipe. That'll be another nice step to making our house a home. After that I'm going to try and get a quote from a carpenter to put floating bookshelves throughout my office and our family room. My dad and I had never really arrived at a good solution for my desire to keep the shelves really organic, feeling like they're part of the house, not just shelves jammed in front of the wall, so it'll be good to have a professional do so. (I'm also not sure how to make them look good around my desk and file cabinet, so again: hopefully a professional can help).
So after a six month or so hiatus (during which COVID mostly fizzled out on Kauai, but also during our finances settled thanks to the sale of our Berkeley house), we're back to slowly settling back in to our new home. Ain't going to be done this year though.
This was a long, long process because it was interrupted by the initial COVID lockdown, and then by them by them settling in some new (quarantined) renters from New York, and then by us going to Oahu .... it's been that sort of year.
When my dad had initially suggested that we build these shelves that I wanted for my closet, I'd thought that we'd just knock together a dozen or so pieces of wood, like we had for old bookshelves that we'd built for previous residences (mostly donated to Uhuru Furniture before we left), but instead he'd had in mind making real furniture, and that's what we did.
We cut, then we attached real wood onto to the front of the plywood to give the shelves a nice facade. And we glued and attached and sanded and routed and filled screw holes and stained and finished. And there we are half a year later!
And I have to agree, they look quite nice, like real furniture.
Oh, except there was one final step after we thought we were done. We'd installed one of the shelves in my office closet and I put the Bronze Age Omnibus by Jack Kirby on it, a 1400-some page hardcover book, and my dad didn't like the way the shelf wobbled, so we ended up cutting strips of wood to back each of the shelves (and stained and attached and finished those).
So after we finished things last Tuesday, we finally did another project, which was install a new fan in our living room.
The old one made scary, wobbly fans when run on high, and that particularly disturbed my dad, and we got to calling it the death fan.
So we'd picked up some new fans last week, and we installed that first one on Tuesday ...
And now at high speed it makes slightly less scary, but still kinda wobbly sounds.
We've got an identical fan for the dining room, so we'll see what it does, because if it doesn't do the same thing, there's something wrong with our first installation (or the fixture).
Meanwhile, this left me the task of filling that bookcase, in a closet that had been mostly unused since we got here. (OK, honestly, it was starting to accumulate junk, so it's good we got in there before it became unsalvageable.) I set to it with alacrity, and spent somewhere more than half a day of work on it between Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday. I went through about 30 boxes of graphic novels and omnibuses (which had to be re-merged, since they'd been placed in different boxes for sizing) and pretty much entirely filled the closet.
I've got 3 boxes that I never opened, and maybe 192 quarts of books that I unboxed and couldn't fit. So I guess they're not all going in the closet.
I looked some to see if there was more that I wanted to cull, but the answer was, "Not at this time". I culled a lot in Berkeley. So, some of the comics will have to go in the less friendly environment outside of the closet (which has a dehumidifier).
At the moment I've got Marvel on the left shelf, DC and Vertigo on the right shelf, and Valiant overhead, alongside a lot of books to read. And everything's is tightly packed, so there's no room for growth. That means that mostly "indie" books will have to go outside of the closet, plus I'll have to figure out how to manage growth within the closet itself.
I've got my eye on a stretch of wall just to the left of the closet for the rest that should keep everything nearby (unlike in Berkeley when the comics were stretched across at least five different shelves (perhaps more) in three different rooms. It'll be nice to have everything together, and what I've got is already better organized.
One unfriendly discovery: our packers were crap at packing comics. In the first box of graphic novels they packed, I literally found one bent into a "U". Generally, they tossed graphic novels in haphazardly with no attention to their pages interleaving or things bending them. In all I think there were slightly less than 20 that they damaged to noticeable levels out of 3 boxes they packed. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I found maybe half-a-dozen I'd damaged out of 30 boxes. That's a big difference.
Fortunately, the graphic novels they packed fell into two categories: things I read in the last few weeks before they showed up and things that I'd planned to someday replace with sturdier omnibuses. The majority were the latter, and so that was most of what they damaged. About a dozen books that they messed up had in fact been replaced in the last 10 months or so, so those were unfortunately just thrown out.
I am so, so happy that I packed the majority of our books myself (and was sending new purchases on to my dad by October or so).
After unboxing all those graphic novels, I had a family room full of boxes, which I broke down last night and today.
Then today there was a mighty pass around Eleele and Hanapepe getting rid of stuff.
Talk Story got another two armfuls of graphic novels that I'd replaced since they were packed (also allowing me to support the only book store on the island, which is pretty important right now).
A ton of cardboard got recycled near Salt Pond (though curiously the actual beach was blocked off by police cars and a helicopter seemed to be regularly picking up water).
Some stuff from Kimberly got dropped off at Habitat for Humanity.
And I tried to get some new Sterilite tubs at Ace Hardware, but they just had what looked like a lower quality brand, and which wouldn't have matched what I already have. (Which might have been OK, but I didn't have the precise measurements with me to fit on the shelves in the garage).
It was weird making the run out to Salt Pond and Habitat again, because I was doing that a bit in January and February and March, and then when the Shelter in Place occurred at the end of March, that stopped.
It was also my first time either into Hanapepe proper or Talk Story since we'd moved.
(And I say it was a "mighty pass", but it just took an hour. Thanks, Julie!)
So, I've still got some graphic novels that need to be re-stored, but otherwise the great graphic-novel shelf project is done and our house is that much closer to being a normal home, both for the removal of 20-25% of our remaining boxes, and for recreating my graphic novel library.
(I was really thrilled to have them back, and have already started reading some of the stuff that had been in storage.)
Oh, and I've figured out at least two graphic novels I'm missing, which suggests to me that there's still some unboxed — stuff that I read in July and August according to Goodreads, which probably means it ended up in a weird box, after I'd packaged its brethren (but thankfully I read them before the graphic-novel-murdering packers got there). That probably means I should unpack the last three graphic novel boxes into Sterilites when I get more (hopefully at Home Depot next Monday or Tuesday) and maybe get it all better sorted.
When we were walking a few nights ago, my dad mentioned that the shelves had taken quite a long time and queried if we wanted to do more or not.
I've had fun working on the project with him, but I'm also entirely happy to pay someone to work on the rest of the shelves we need, so we talked about it a while until I could assess that indeed he felt like we'd done enough.
So right now we're waiting on a quote that Kimberly has out to replace the old, sticky, sunfaded curtains throughout the house, most of them hung from very classy PVC pipe. That'll be another nice step to making our house a home. After that I'm going to try and get a quote from a carpenter to put floating bookshelves throughout my office and our family room. My dad and I had never really arrived at a good solution for my desire to keep the shelves really organic, feeling like they're part of the house, not just shelves jammed in front of the wall, so it'll be good to have a professional do so. (I'm also not sure how to make them look good around my desk and file cabinet, so again: hopefully a professional can help).
So after a six month or so hiatus (during which COVID mostly fizzled out on Kauai, but also during our finances settled thanks to the sale of our Berkeley house), we're back to slowly settling back in to our new home. Ain't going to be done this year though.