The Twelfth Bookshelf

This past Saturday, Francine and I finally broke down and bought another matching bookshelf for the den. Two years ago, when we first finished the basement and dedicated a single room as the computer room/writing room/library, we headed off to Zellers and bought a series of very affordable 5 shelf bookshelves and were FINALLY able to unpack all those boxes of books we'd kept under the stairs for so long. (The original bookshelf setup also included a quick trip to Home Depot where I picked up some extra wood and hardware so I could add 3 extra shelves to two of them for Mass Market paperbacks, and an additional shelf to two other ones for the extra space. And my handiwork kind of blends in quite nicely if I might add.)

We lasted a couple of years with the eight units in the basement den and the four other units in the house. Actually, we also have two smaller corner bookshelves that we got in December of 2006, but I didn't want to count them, because the title "The Twelfth Bookshelf" sounds much better than "The Fourteenth Bookshelf" and we're not stuffing these particular ones to full book capacity because they're in the living room and only have enough books on them to "look nice" rather than overwhelm. Also half of the shelves have plants or pictures or other decorative items.

And, yes, we ended up piling stacks on top of the spines of the shelved books because there wasn't room for more. That's why we finally caved in and bought a new bookshelf.

On Saturday night, Alexander helped me put the new bookshelf together. It's simply amazing at how much he not only WANTS to help but is actually ABLE to help. He helped with holding pieces of wood together for me, with tightening screws and with hammering in the nails for the back of the shelving unit. (I love the determined look on his face in the picture below as he's hammering in a nail)

He also helped raise a goosebump on my head when he was moving one of the shelves; but he did kiss it better for me.

And since I did record some of the moments of the event, I thought it'd be fun to experiment with my very first YouTube video, so I uploaded it for your viewing pleasure: