CV, Etc. | Main | More Likely to be Eaten by Cats
December 17, 2007
Creative Remedies for a Not-So-Slight Slant
In May, right before we left for Turkey, we wound up taking In an emergency barricade measure in order to keep the feline brood separate during or trip. We quickly moved a bookcase over a few feet to seal up one of our hallways. The glitch was that two other bookcases that had originally lined the hall needed to be moved about a foot in order to be flush. Unfortunately, we were in a giant rush and had no time to remove 4,000 books from three cases in order to do the task right, so we left it kind of caddy-cornered- "temporarily". The slant drove me nuts, but there that bookshelf sat, from May through...well, Sunday.
The weather was gross out this weekend and I have been under the influence of The Bug, so we decided stay in, do some cleaning, and rectify the bookcase situation once and for all. We removed all of the books from each of the three cases, moved the two offending pieces of furniture down and swung the main case flush against the two hallway walls. Except it wasn't flush. AT ALL. The floor was so slanted that the bookcase literally leaned from one wall to the other on a diagonal.
Sometime you have to find in-house solutions that are best solved with wood and power tools. This was one of those instances. After some thought, we grabbed all of Lex's old paperback sci-fi novels and lined the gap between one side of the slanty bookcase and the wall. By increasing the book width ever so slightly as we went up, we were able to stabilize the case and make it stand straight. I'm sure this is only a temporary solution, though temporary in our household usually means 5-7 months, so we'll see how that all works out.
P.S. I also alphabetized all of the books in our back hall cases (that would be the fiction books). It took a little over three hours and I never want to engage in that task again.
Posted by callalillie at December 17, 2007 6:38 AM | City Life
Clever thematic solution -- and I quite like the way it looks, too. We used to stick stacks of pennies under the front edges of our bookshelves so they didn't lean away from the wall. Walls = straight, floor = not so much. In our second house the pennies were replaced by a yardstick running underneath the front of the base of the shelves. Just in case -- the floor was more level in that house, but by then we had small children and the thought of 5 million pounds of books and shelves toppling over on one of them was too gruesome to contemplate/
Posted by: kmkat at December 17, 2007 1:21 PM
Alphabetized by author or by title? I'm tempted to arrange by color, but suspect I won't be able to find anything...
Posted by: yp at December 17, 2007 2:07 PM
Author- but I still can't find much. We have a lot of doubles, though, and organizing made it easier to target them and weed.
Posted by: corie at December 17, 2007 2:13 PM
In my apartment all of the floors slant. Some are practically hills. We use old hardbacks to prop the front of the couch so that it is level and you don't feel like you are slipping off the front.
Posted by: Ms. M at December 17, 2007 7:12 PM
using old books to fill gaps--genius!
see, theres one reason i won't throw out all my old books, besides the fact that i just like having them around. that doesnt seem to be enough for my stepmother, who hates clutter, but now i have a good reason.
"if we ever need to prop something up..."
Posted by: Seton at December 17, 2007 7:22 PM
