The Mandelbear's Musings

It's often been said that "there's no such thing as too many books, just not enough bookshelves". When we reorganized the kitchen after getting it debugged, we wound up moving all of the tea-related stuff to the baker's rack. The bottom shelves already had tea in them, but the upper shelves had cookbooks.

We moved the cookbooks, temporarily, into boxes, and I set about thinking about where to put them. The five feet of blank wall in the living room, just to the left of the existing bookshelves, looked about right, so I ordered another Elfa top rail and three standards from the Container Store, which is the only place you can get the stuff anymore.

When I first switched to Elfa shelving, it was before the Container Store bought the company in 1999, and you could still get Elfa components from Ace Hardware. They were cheaper, too, and came in metric sizes.

The only Container stores in the Seattle area are in Southcenter (near the SEATAC airport) and Bellevue. I ordered online and had it shipped, thank you very much, during one of their occasional sales.

Elfa shelf standards have two rows of slots, with U-shaped brackets. (They're mostly compatible with two-row standards from other manufacturers.) They're strong. Single-slot brackets are flimsy. The standards come in two flavors--screwed to the wall, or hung from rails. These days I prefer the ones that hang from rails because you don't have to worry about finding studs.

The rail I needed to put up is 80 inches long. (I should, arguably, have gotten a shorter one. Whatever.) One end was going to end up over the CD towers, and there wasn't enough room for my stepladder there. And besides, I wanted it to line up with the shelves that were already there. That meant using a level and a short piece of rail to mark the position for the right-most and third-from-the-right screws, installing wallboard anchors, dangling the rail from that one screw, and trying to hold it level while putting in the other screw. That's when I discovered that I'd let the level slip, or something, and put the second anchor about two inches too high.

After fixing that, it was just a matter of putting in the rest of the screws. I like using walldog screws for that - they're designed to hold well in drywall. I managed (by pure luck) to get one of them into a stud, close to the left end. So that's good.

Tomorrow or Thursday I'm going to have to go out and buy some boards. Most of my supply of lumber has deteriorated from being left outside several times during various moves. Ugh. *sigh*

So much for the idea of putting a TV on that wall. We've been without it for two years and haven't missed it much.

The dressers in our bedroom, though lovely, are about 20 years old and are starting to fall apart. (In particular, the back of Colleen's has cracked and partially popped off due to constantly trying to cram too many pairs of pants into it.)

Also, while there was plenty of room for a queen-sized bed, there's less room for a king. The plan is to replace them with Elfa shelving, possibly with some home-made additions. This will eventually be moderately expensive but can be done incrementally.

The room -- especially the carpet -- needs a thorough cleaning. And we need to swap the rented hospital beds for the ones I purchased recently.

So there's quite a bit of work in the offing. I'm pretty sure I can get the dressers emptied over the course of the week. Getting them out of the house is another matter. Swapping the beds also looks like a big job, though I've seen it done by one person.

Anyone feel like coming over next weekend and lending a hand? I'm planning to make a big pot of chili.

instructables : Jackhammer Headphones

These home-made hifi headphones work as well or better than Bose noise-cancelling headphones.
Cost: $20
Time to make: one minute.
Difficulty: none.
Unlike the Bose model, these block outside noise instead of cancelling it.

Basically you just buy good hearing protectors, and install the speakers from cheap phones in them. Not as good-sounding as my $99 pair of Sennheiser HD280Pro's, but 1/5 the price and probably better blocking.