mismatched shelves

This morning I woke up feeling like I was coming down with some kind of crud--not bad, and not unexpected considering I've been coughing my head off for a few days, but not fun either. So I didn't do much today.

In fact, all I'd intended to do was add a bracket to the long shelf I put up yesterday, then use wood glue to stick the two wooden brackets to the wall better. But the wood glue worked so well that I decided to put the second shelf up today after all. I added a third bracket. It doesn't match. This is going to drive me crazy enough that I will probably go back to the store eventually and get a third wooden bracket to match. And then I won't be able to get the metal bracket off the wall.

The problem was, when I put one of the particleboards on the brackets to see how it looked, it was much too wide for the brackets. Well, crap. But there are all kinds of old boards stored in the rafters, so I pulled one of the shorter pieces down and sawed it in half.

(This sounds much easier than it was. Actually, it was easy: it's an old board and sawed easily. The problem was I didn't have a real saw, just a bowsaw, so I had to go back to the store for like the 40th time this weekend to buy one.)

The wood was so beautifully weathered that I decided it didn't need staining, which by an amazing coincidence matched up with my desire to never stain anything ever again. I put the back piece up first, nailing it inexpertly to the studs (I am really very bad at nailing). Then I put the shelf piece up and secured it with a single screw, because I didn't feel like doing anything else and it feels pretty sturdy and anyway I just want to go to bed and watch River Monsters.

Hopefully it'll still be there tomorrow. If the wood glue fails overnight, all my new bottles are going to smash and I'll be sad.

Also, if you ever think I'm being modest when I say I'm a slapdash worker, keep in mind that I didn't actually use a level on that shelf. I just eyeballed it. It only tilts a little.

Breaking everything!

I started off this afternoon's project by breaking a glass. It was just a little votive candle holder, so it's not like it was expensive. But it was a harbinger of things to come.

I had several things I wanted to do this weekend. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find some of the supplies I need to do the things, so they'll have to wait. I did get some particle-board to use for shelves, though, and when I got home I immediately got to work staining them (after I swept up the broken glass).

The previous owners of the house--the ones who I think of as the monkey family, since the bathrooms sure smelled like a monkey house when I moved in--had started a project in the garage but never finished it. Bless their hearts. I'm not sure what they had in mind, but it looks like two shelves for very, very tall people. But the shelves they left were the crappy, plasticky kind from a cheap bookshelf. I moved those out right away; they're leaning against the side of the garage now in hopes bees will carry them away.

So I was left with a jerry-rigged structure for a shelf. I had to remove the pieces that are sticking up in that picture--they weren't very secure, they didn't seem to have any real function, and they were in the way. Apparently the monkey family ran out of the right length of screws by the time they got to those pieces, though, because the screws were really short, buried into the wood half an inch or more and impossible to extract. So I used a combination of brute force and twisting to wrench them off. It worked, but one day I'm going to try that and get my eyeballs impaled or something.

I wore a pair of those one-size-fits-all-if-you're-a-guy-and-have-big-hands nylon gloves while staining the shelves, and of course they got slippery. So when I picked up the can of stain halfway through the job to move it, no surprise that it slid right out of my grasp and splashed all over the floor. Oops. [picture below shows stain AFTER cleaning, not before. It looked much worse before]

I used as much of the spilled stain to finish the shelves as fast as I could. Then I mopped up more of it from the floor, smearing it all over the place. I may have said some bad words. Finally I just left it and put the big shelf up to see how it looked.

Well, it looks pretty good. It needs a bracket or something in the middle because it sags, but I'll pick one up eventually. I also tried to hang two wooden brackets I'd stained to go with one of the smaller shelves, but it turns out they need more hardware. I'm not sure what to get or how to make them secure on the wall. They look good just sitting there, though. I'll figure something out.

Finally I couldn't put it off anymore and checked the can of stain to see what it suggested for clean-up. Well, it doesn't. Most of the label is taken up with warnings. The stain is very flammable, so I figured it couldn't hurt to try lighter fluid and see if that helped. It's not like I could make it even more flammable than it already is.

Lighter fluid worked a little. Nothing is going to get it all up, though. That's okay, it's a garage floor. I went into the house, scrubbed my hands and arms with lighter fluid (while I had the can open) to get the stain off, then scrubbed my hands and arms with soap to get the lighter fluid off. Then I did it all again because of course I didn't get all the stain off. When I discovered I was trying to scrub off a bruise, I gave up and took a shower.

After I was clean and in fresh clothes, I went back out to the garage and tinkered around with little stuff for a while. I found a candle-holder I'd almost forgotten about and put a candle in it. Before I lit the candle (to drip wax into the holder so the candle would sit upright), I determined that if the garage went up in a ball of flame, I would grab the photo of my imaginary boyfriend if possible before I bolted outside into the rain.

I wish I'd gotten more done today. Tomorrow I'll work on hanging a second shelf if I can manage to figure out the brackets.

The shelves, before and after

Finally it's the weekend, which means I can get back to work on the garage. It's taking me so much longer than I expected!

Today I took three trips to the dump and one to Goodwill, getting rid of eight or nine bags of stuff in all. There's more to go, but I was too embarrassed to go to the dump again. It'll keep.

I wanted to accomplish something today that would make me feel like I'm actually making progress. So I focused on the brick-and-board shelves that used to hold gardening stuff.

I'd never stained wood before, at least not that I recall, and I was a bit intimidated. I don't know why. It was ludicrously simple. I stained the table in the back corner of the garage first, and it was not only easy but I thought it looked really good immediately.

Of course everything's easy if you do a sloppy job. I have low standards.

I let the boards dry for a few hours while I worked in the yard and ran errands (in that order, so I probably frightened some people with my appearance). Then I stacked the bricks, making sure that each pair was the same height since the bricks were a mixture of new pavers and very old bricks, some of them apparently handmade.

It looked good when done, and I had a few fun minutes decorating it. All the stuff on the shelves was already in the garage, incidentally. This might be a good time to mention that my grandmother was an antique dealer for decades. Me and my brother and all our cousins grew up helping move furniture, and along the way we absorbed a lot of knowledge and interest in antiques. Most of the stuff on the shelves, though, was my mother's.

Tomorrow I'll arrange more furniture, sweep the garage out, and make some decisions about what to do with all those boxes of Christmas decorations. And if I have time, I'll hit the antique shops. I need some gadgets.