I’ve been sitting in a new office, in a new house, in a new town for a few months now. My spouse has the gift of gathering and pinning and placing until strangeness fades and a home materializes within days of our arrival. Except for my little office. Here, there are still boxes of bobbleheads and pencils and pamphlets and pictures stacked along the wall. There are books piled on and under and next to my desk. A little disorder is oddly comforting to me, but finally something needed to be done.
I started off scrolling through search results for “bookshelves.” The well-made pieces were way more than I wanted to spend, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy the cheap faux wood options that littered the apartments of our early married years. So I decided to build some myself.
I measured more times than I could count, drew a few rough sketches, and then went to the hardware store and loaded my little truck with the nondescript pine boards that would become a little home to my things. When it started to come together, the gaps were not quite flush and the angles a little off. There were so many trips back to the hardware store, so many “how to” searches, so many times up and down the stairs to find my tape measure. More than once I thought that maybe a cheap set of shelves wouldn’t be so bad.
