Posted in Backstory, Elsinore, My brain, tagged books, Lady Macbeth, Little Lord Fauntleroy, more books, personal librairies, shelving, Two Years before the Mast on 31 January, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Just about every room in the house contains books. Some are older than either of us; others are from our college years or from our assorted career paths.
“Do you think this one goes best with the theology books or the children’s lit?” I ask.
She listens for the title, which is in German.
She considers for a moment, then: “Theology.”
“Can those go up in the attic for now?”
“Sure.”
And so on….
Much furniture wrangling at Chez Rhet these days.
Posted in Backstory, Elsinore, Rennovations, tagged childhood, DIY, effort, furniture, hand planes, shelving, Woodworking on 8 October, 2012| Leave a Comment »
There is something so very satisfying about finally using tools and techniques and materials that have been dormant for a long time.
The little blue cabinet was a gift for me when I was a child; it held books and treasures and was one of the first pieces of furniture in my first house. Arriving at Elsinore, it stood in a corner for years, biding its time to be useful again. Yesterday it was brought into the kitchen, cleaned up, and the baking pans got neatly filed in the lower case (previously the home of many, many children’s books).
But to stock the upper case with cookbooks, I needed to make shelves.
In the basement is the wood stash. Some I acquired from friend’s families, pine from a colleague whose spouse could no longer do woodworking, and batches of redwood and butternut from trees that were felled at the old house.
One piece of pine, cut to fit…. But I needed the shelf to be four inches or so wider. Okay, there was a likely piece of butternut……
This is where it gets fun. I had collected a few old hand planes in the mid-90s, restored them, and set them aside…. But now I could set up my bench with a stop in the tail vise, adjust the blade and turn that rough wood into part of a shelf! Complex joinery this isn’t, of course, but a lovely reminder that old efforts are not wasted, and good exercise, too.
Rethorykal Questions 