The dining room table that wanted to be a bookshelf

 If you just wait for something long enough (and keep your eyes open), sometimes it comes to you.  

This is just such a story about waiting and receiving.   The story begins with waiting.  In the middle, the circular saw make a guest appearance.  In the end, books.   

The waiting begins

Here's the waiting part:  two Julys ago (that is, July 2019), my husband and I moved into a new, smaller home.  During the move, I used my college math office (with its approximately one-gazillion feet of bookshelves) as a temporary staging place for a bunch of books that would eventually move with us, once I got bookshelves installed in the new place.  

But because it's me, there was no the heck way I was just going to go out and purchase bookshelves for the new place.   Firstly, there were a bunch of other big things we wanted to do in the home -- change walls from gray to happy colors, install grab bars in places that need them, yada yada.  Secondly, the environmentalist in me hates being the reason for new consumer goods.  Thirdly, the frugalist in me hates paying money for something when I'm pretty sure I can get it for patience instead of for pennies.  So, the waiting begins.

Oh, yeah, and then there was a pandemic, which became yet another reason to avoid stores.

I did the usual casual ask-around thing when I thought about it (anyone happen to have spare lumber lying around?), but mostly I didn't think about it.  Life is good, and my poetry books don't seem to mind hanging out in a math office.   There are other things I keep hoping to randomly find lying around -- our four-wheeled garden cart isn't as useful at our new place, and I'd love to replace it with one of those two-wheeled foldable grocery carts, for example.  But there's no hurry for any of this, really.

Except.  At any rate, next July I'm going to have to move all my stuff out of my college office, because I'm becoming a dean.  Being a dean means I'll make more money (which I actually don't need), but have fewer bookshelves (which I kinda do need), but somehow I decided to take one for the team and accept the job anyway.  So the bookshelf/lumber hunt got a bit more urgent.  

The waiting is over

Just about every evening after dinner, my husband and I take a walk around the block.  (We hold hands, so adorable, and we wave at the people who hang out on their porches, and I point out the state of the moon while he points out the interesting cars that go by.   It's a nice ritual).  About a week ago, we did our usual walk on trash night, and I noticed that one of our neighbors had put an entire dining room table at the curb.  One of the legs had snapped off, but the rest of the table was in perfect shape, a giant 38"x64" slab of lumber just lying there waiting for the next morning's trash trucks to come by and haul it off to a landfill.  Ding!  I was ready to do my part for the environment by rescuing that table from its garbage-y fate.  We added a second loop-around-the-block and carried the table home.

I took some measurements and sketched out a division on my trusty old chalkboard (oh, yeah, and now you can see that a professional mathematician doesn't trust that she can actually do "38 - 24" in her head). 

The best part about bringing something like this home is disassembling it.  There's something in me that loves unscrewing stuff and reducing it to its component pieces.   I got a bunch of really nice screws, which are probably worth it even apart from the rest of the table.  

Enter the circular saw.  

A bit of measuring, and a lot of noise . . .  

. . . and soon the table looked like this: a bunch of boards.  

I carried the boards up the Command Center, grabbed my totally awesome cordless drill, and put the table back together again, in a completely new form.  Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly! Or a tadpole turning into a frog!  Only it's a table turning into a bookshelf.  

And, a day or two of fun painting later, the bookshelf tucked itself right into the corner, like it had always belonged there.  I love the multiple colors of paint and variation (which happily camouflage the carpentry bloopers that I lovingly include in every woodworking project I undertake). 

Notice how perfectly this fits -- that's a great benefit of making the shelf myself.  You can't quite see it from this angle, but the shelves stick out of the back, so that the uprights are flush with the baseboard trim, but the shelves reach all the way back to the wall.  The 24" width means the shelf fits right into that space, and the height means I don't have to rehang those pictures on the wall to the left.  

Bonus find

And then, one week later, as my husband did our walk around the block and it happened to be trash day yet again, we walked by not one, but two two-wheeled shopping carts.  In excellent condition.  So now I not only have a most excellent bookshelf, but I also have a most excellent way to cart my books from my office to my home, so the bookshelf won't be empty much longer.   I feel like Eeyore on his birthday!