So, yesterday, despite sleep deprivation and a near overwhelming tiredness I attacked the bookcase that was waiting to go up in the office. It doesn’t really match the rest of the office shelving, it doesn’t match anything in there, quite frankly, but it was the best I could find in our price range and ready in anything like in time. See, with Kathryn’s dad coming over I wanted the box shelf up above the desk. Only I don’t have a box shelf. I didn’t, as it happens, have any kind of shelf ready to go there. And having asked at the wood recycling place I found their lead time on just planned/sanded timber is four weeks. Kathryn’s dad arrives in just over 6, and the idea of me trying to cut, sand, varnish and fit a box shelf having got the wood with only two weeks (where I’d be working full time and doing a course for work) filled me with that vague dread that can only be associated with knowing that it would not work.
I could foresee him and his partner arriving, and the room being still filled with junk.
So I searched, and eventually accepted that ikea are cheaper by miles for these shelves. Indeed box shelves are ridiculously expensive, as a general rule. What we ended up with aren’t really box shelves, actually, but Kathryn was so uninspired by the ikea box shelves that we decided to get something a bit different. Actually, thinking about it, I probably should have rung our kitchen-maker and asked him, but hey, didn’t think of that then.
Anyhow, so I got the shelves, and started to assemble them and then realised that, well, really they should be cut to fit our picture rail, because they have that kind of shape at the top that suggests that the top edge should align with the picture rail. So I prepared to break out the jigsaw. Also, I realised (unfortunately whilst I was assembling them) the hanging method supplied would require cutting in to our picture rail. Now that is simply not going to happen. We’ve gone to great lengths to save our picture rail, even saving a chunk so that we could put it back in the corridor on the new section of wall. Even our kitchen still sports a picture rail.
So after some hemming and hawing, I decided to support the shelves with dirty great lumps of wood which, I decided, I would paint white. Later.
And thus, this was achieved:
And fairly quickly turned into this:
As a bonus, here’s some of our ‘top shelf’ reading matter… (although, to be fair, some of ’em are games…)
There was some swearing, of course. There was a hole into a brick which appears to be made of adamantium. Even the ‘decent’ masonry bit was laughed at… It sounded like a lump of steel, but the metal drill bit was just mocked mercilessly*. In the end, I just moved a bit and drilled a new hole, although not before some wailing and gnashing of teeth over damaging our beautiful wall.
Also, during my ‘tired’ episode I managed to kill our printer. For various reasons I had around 150 pages to print yesterday, and wound up the spring on our venerable Kyocera FS-1030D and set it printing. Off it went. Of course, in preparation for this I dumped a pile of paper (which I’d just found) into the drawer. To do this I moved the printer across on it’s little shelf so it was up against the shelves next to it, because otherwise the drawer fouls the leg of the desk. Unfortunately, I didn’t move it back.
It turns out that the printer will quite happily kill itself before admitting that it’s overheating. It stopped printing with a paper jam, and when I took the paper out, it sat twiddling its little status lights in a status light sequence that’s not in the numpty manual.
Eventually I found the service manual and discovered that the status lights meant ‘fuser thermistor (and thermal cut out) failed’. I googled the spare part. $120 dollars! The printer was only $25. Then I remembered the spares printer, and that, as I recall failed with some kind of drum/motor error. So this morning I stripped the two of them down…
Rather than switching the thermistor (because I’m a lazy toad) I just switched the entire fuser units over, and lo, the printer doth work. Thank the lord, because I needed that paper today, and lo, it is printed.
Also, side point, I love Kyocera for making the manual available. I just really wish they had a mac version of the application to configure the network card in it.
* Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries…
