My Orphaned Bookcases (with 5+ photos) and various anecdotes of the roofleak that lead to them, as well as tips for moving your own bookcases around

BLOT: (29 Jan 2011 - 05:11:17 PM)

My Orphaned Bookcases (with 5+ photos) and various anecdotes of the roofleak that lead to them, as well as tips for moving your own bookcases around

Some went into storage. A few boxes. We'll say half a dozen books, probably about 20-30 books per box, on average (though that might be a high average). That cleared about six shelves of books, total. The rest, though had to be moved. I am referring to my many bookcases full of books that occupied a room that I used to call my study/library, and right now is just kind of called that room. The backroom. The mid-sized bedroom. The back-left room. Isn't it interesting how a room's name is wholly dependent upon some combination of its use and contents (but which trumps which?). You could call any room you wish a kitchen, but that would be pointless. And its use is derived from a subset of things unrelated to the room's structure as a room (somewhat unrelated) but which might be related to its relation to other rooms. Fascinating stuff, I wonder if if a Frenchman has ever written about it?

What precipitated this great migration of books from one named spot—library—to several spots which had other names—guest bedroom, bedroom, living room—was the January 15th roofleak escalation, which I will call RLE. The RLE came after a prolonged fortnight (it was something like 17 days, so fortnight++) of mild to medium leak after the Christmas snow started to melt. There was one afternoon where a great black fluid came gushing out of our light fixture, but most other leaks were localized to one spot, about 7-o'clock and a fair junk of a meter from said fixture as you face the parking lot (i.e. backwall) of the room. Over the next couple of weeks of constant drip, that area became progressively weaker, soggier. It became so soggy that simply pressing against it would lead to a small dimple where water would drip through. Over time, this section weakened and weakened and despite a couple of drain wholes being punched, a crack started to form.

The RLE occurred when water forcing itself through that crack and spreading ended up with a much larger hole right around that same spot, and we had active gallons of water coming through (over the 15th, 16th, and 17th: as much as 20 gallons was drained). Conversations with the management lead to some frustration, because we had to keep running around and tending to a number of things to stop the leak from damaging our stuff and theirs, and they were pushing forth paperwork to get the roof fixed and so were irritated with our constant questions (I have sympathy for why they felt we were being overbearing, though having two exhausting weekends of tending to the problem while starting up a new semester of school and having my job amp back up to the new semester of work thins most of it down to purely rational levels). Over the 10 days it took to get the roof inspected, an estimate, a submission, permission, and the actual men-on-the-roof repairs; Sarah and I had to move all of the bookcases from the room, put up plastic tarps to protect the furniture left behind that we had no room for, and to get various bits into storage. But this post is not about the roofleak, or the RLE, per se. It is about finding room in an already full apartment.

Beside the library, we have four main rooms (the two bathrooms are out). The kitchen was not available for what we needed, but in potential could have been if nothing else was available. The three remaining rooms are our guest bedroom, which was overly full because it had been used as a storage room, our main bedroom, which was mostly full, and a living room (ditto). The storage shed sucked up a lot of the slack, and enabled us to get a few large things out of the guest bedroom and living room. Still, it is a 5x10 and even with careful stacking, is half the size of our smallest room. It was a pressure valve, not a solution. This meant we had to find a way to place a full rooms worth of stuff into three other full rooms, and only had about half a room's worth of leeway.

The guest bedroom (aka, study's little cousin) was the first to be tackled. Our guest bed is luckily a futon, which we transformed into couch formation and then shoved along the wall with the window into the space behind the freezer. This gave exactly one wall free, less than 4 meters wide. This is enough room for four bookcases. What we did, though, was execute a plan of mine for space optimization. We placed three of the cases against the wall in slots A, B, and D. Slot C had room for one more bookcase, but how we handled it is by taking two bookcases and turning them perpendicular to the others This gave us five bookcases and room at the end to place another smaller, paperback-esque case. We also took advantage of some close shelving and careful placement to get about half a case's worth of books carefully stacked (not pictured). The image below is messy (the cleaning is not complete) and at an angle, but gives you an idea.

Now we had to move things into the bedroom or the living room. Here is the question: how do you shift bookcases in such a way as to minimize the back-and-forth as well as the pre- and post-work needed? How Sarah and I did it was to take the books off in left-to-right clumps from the top shelf down. Then, you stack them in such a way that the right-most book of that clump would be facing up. Essentially, as you take the books off the shelf, you turn them so the front covers are facing up. You stack the top shelf in a line designated for the top shelf, and the other shelves below it. In this way, you not only allow the bottom shelves to keep anchoring the bookcase, but when you restack it, they are the first ones to go back in. In a similar way, as you turn the books back to "bookshelf" orientation, they are in the exact same order they were originally in. You can see a set of stacks in transition below.

The reason this is important, by the way, is because you have to treat this like a three-point turn. You cannot merely put the books just anywhere. You have to stack them in such a way as to be able to navigate the carrying of the books and then the bookshelf itself, and then, after you get to the new location, be able to get back to the stacks. If you think of our apartment like a playing card, fold it in half long-ways and then width-ways. The bottom right corner is our living room and, to the left side, closets. The bottom left is our bedroom and bathrooms. A hall runs along the left-side of the middle crease, from about half-way up the bottom half to half up the top half. The upper left bit is our library. Right of the hallway, along the top section, is the guest bedroom. About a fourth of the top half, all the right and above the living room, is our kitchen. From library to guest bedroom is easy, we stack the books in the hall. The other two, though, require a careful game.

This game is partially because once we get the books in the living room, we are going to have to block off a portion of the hall way into the living room, which means we have less room to navigate while moving books into the bedroom. However, the books going into the bedroom are behind the books going into the living room. We eventually had to move one bookshelf into the living room, then slightly rearrange the living room to facilitate moving books into the bedroom, get some free room and then finish the living room and then finish (finally) the bedroom.

To make room in the living room required logical choices. We could not impede upon our ability to keep working/living in there. We were semi-saved by it being close to Christmas, which means we had made room for the Christmas tree, which was down but the space had not been fully refilled. This allowed me to move my chair and desk and laptop out of the leak-soaked room and into the living room. We also had to move around so we still had outlets and the like available. There was no specific trickery involved here outside of just measuring and measuring. Which is my main tip of this paragraph: pre-measure. Reduce your furniture to rectangles on a 2-D grid. There were subtle movements of CD racks and couches and whatnot that allowed us to get both cases needed in the living room in there, without any loss of any function. Yay, us.

Which leaves us with the bedroom, which had the second largest change behind the guest bedroom, and probably the largest change when you factor in functionality. We swung our bed (confession: Sarah and I sleep only on a single mattress on the floor) to under the window. Had to lose a night-stand to the library (one of the bits draped in plastic, now) but was able to make a small "corridor" between my desk in there and Sarah's chest-of-drawers. The fan and some other things were put in there. My desk chair is placed under my desk and then her chair is on wheels and can be moved back and forth. All of the bookcases (four plus a smaller) are against one wall and there is some free space in between. How this works is that at night, I put my chair up and we swing the fan out and put what's needed into the space between the bed and shelves. During the day, that stuff can go on the bed, my chair can come out, and the fan can be swung in to allow me to get to my closet (or swung around the other way so she can get to her clothes). The room literally changes utility depending on the time of day, but that works. It is similar in practice to the man who turned his tiny apartment into a swiss-army knife of adjustable living spaces but on a much smaller scale of innovation and adjustment. Still, makes me think that something much more elaborate could be made if I wanted.

And that wraps that up. The library is empty of most things right now. The roof is repaired but there is at least a week or more worth of work to be handled before we can start moving anything back, and we have the option to take our time and to clean well and rearrange what we do put in there so that it will be more organized and maybe more efficient. Still, it took us a good 12 hours or so of work to do what we've done, if not more (had to be more) and I'm expecting a similar amount of work to put things back. The good news is, we had to clear enough room and make our storage more efficient to do the task, which means when we get that backroom back to rights, then our stuff in our other rooms should be a lot more manageable. It's the silver lining in this weeks-long dark cloud.

LABEL(s): Me in 2011

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: January 2011