Adventures in Shelving: Part 8 of 8!

We finally know how many blog posts this is going to take! Apparently 8 was the magic number. 

In the last episode of As the BookShelves Happen, the Philosopher was continuing to polish shelves.  Once all of the shelves were finally complete and had rested for a couple of days to let the finish oil set, we went on an entertaining game of shelving heights. 

If you are also a book lover and have a *robust* library, picture if you will trying to estimate how many bookshelves you need and of which height. Oh, and don't use regular measures, use a few books that are about the correct height. We defaulted to three/four books -- a regular paperback, a trade paperback, a Lovecraft book (unpictured) and this very tall knitting book that I grabbed from my office. (Knitting books live in the home office next to the yarn, not in the livingroom).  And we tetrised, and planned, and discussed, and how many-Cthulhu's did we actually need? 

That many, apparently. Note that this isn't actually the final pattern -- a few shelves did get moved around a bit more, but you can see it beginning to take shape. We used all 27 shelves that I'd ordered. Had I planned that? Not really. IKEA let's you stage your IVAR shelving digitally-- sort of, it doesn't work quite as well as I'd like -- but I'd ordered "this many seems like it should be correct" number of shelves. And it worked out nicely. Go me. 

Isn't the color of the shelves lovely? The Dark Bourbon really did turn out well. Each shelf is different with the knots and occasional wood plug and all the striations. The Odie's Oil finish is absolutely stellar.  It initially feels like absolute satin. That tones down over the first 48 hours but the hand is really lovely. It's also food-safe, though I doubt I'll be doing any vegetable chopping on these shelves anytime soon. 

And then came the loading of the books. The far set of shelves is mine, we split the middle, the near shelf is his.  This was still mid-loading, but as you can see, no problem filling the shelves. It's now this wonderfully cozy giant wall in our livingroom. I love it. 

You didn't think that was our only shelving to tackle, did you?  While we didn't get these refinished, I did go ahead and do a temporary load so that more cardboard could go away.  These two small shelves were in my bedroom when I lived in LaCrosse and they've moved the three times since. They aren't especially fancy or nice but they serve very well and I'm looking forward to painting them next spring. For now -- it's my children's book collection: 

And my graphic novels and coming books. Astute readers will see I have all of the Girl Genius graphic novels and a stack of the original small format Cathy Guisewite books. 

It's so lovely to have our books out again. But it's also made me realize just how many books I have that aren't read and so that's something I'm making plans to address. They're lovely books and they are *right here* -- I own them even.