All About a Bookcase

For YEARS, we’ve been trying to get a bookcase. We’re not one of those awesome people who can log onto craigslist and find what we need around here. Aside from living an hour away from any craiglist listed city, we just don’t have “it.” You know what I mean? I go a’yard sailing, but I can’t ever find anything I need. I come home with a heap of treasures, but never any solid bunk beds or dressers… nothing we really need. Someone people are blessed with an almost supernatural skill to go to a yard sale or goodwill or what-have-you and come home with the absolute COOLEST loot. I’m related to about 50 people like this, so I’m curious as to how the gene missed me. I don’t wonder too much about it, though, because I’m too busy striving to best it. I don’t care if I can’t find awesome stuff, I’m going to spend hours looking anyway! I recently came across a Thomas Jefferson quote that I had scrawled in a notebook from college.
“I find the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
Ah, you see? The answer to my problem lies in the wisdom of one of our Great Founding Fathers. And yes, Mr. Jefferson, you can count on me to Dumpster Dive.
That’s what you meant, right?

Anyway, for Christmas my husband took pity on my unrelenting search for a large bookcase and BOUGHT me one. I knew exactly what it was the minute he finished wrapping it and put it under the tree. I mean really: a box taller than I am? Thin? Heavy? Bookcase!
I unwrapped it and left it sitting in the living room until yesterday on account of a few things: sickness, dirty house, time constraints…
Well.
Yesterday, I threw caution and laundry to the wind. Instead of washing laundry all day, I set to cleaning out a corner in my room to set my bookcase up in. It was no small feat -the corner having become the catch-all corner for boxes of paper that had accumulated throughout our married life. My husband needs these kinds of papers close and hand for his job, and so… there they were. They were right within reach and driving me about as bonkers as his promises to “take care of it.” I don’t happen to live with a husband who makes the phrase, “If you want something done… do it yourself” a mantra (praises!) but I do happen to live with a busy husband who comes home exhausted. I also happen to live with a husband who got a PlayStation3 for Christmas… and when it comes to dealing with boxes of papers or playing video games, well, the boxes lose out.
Yesterday, I dug in.
In each box, I’m so sorry to say, I found thank-you notes that had been written and undelivered. Some were from my BRIDAL SHOWER, for crying out loud (and I almost did). At great length, I reached the end of my piles.
After an afternoon of shredding, filing, trashing, laughing, and sighing, I grappled with my bookcase. In the course of completely ignoring the warning on the box that says something like “have someone help you move this blah blah blah” and dragging it -on my own -from the living room to my bedroom, I did something not-so-good to my lower back.
My lower back already has great cause for suffering, Baby #2 making it thus, and no sympathetic host am I.
Was that going to stop me? Ha.
I am, after all, ridiculous.

I pulled out the drill, a hammer, the instructions, and my can-do attitude.

Allow me to detour: this isn’t our first 5-shelf bookcase. I once bought one for 20% off at Wal-Mart. It was the display and it matched my entertainment center in the living room perfectly. I had saved up to buy the matching bookcase, and I loved it… primarily because it didn’t scream “WAL-MART” like the many contraptions I’d purchased as a college student did.
I had purchased the last one -the display (as I said). I waited a long time for the purchase to go through. I don’t remember WHY it took so long. I just remember the mass amounts of spit-up that accumulated on my shoulder from my daughter. That smell is hard to forget.
I watched as they paged two young men to come and load it onto a cart.
I watched as two young men came and loaded it.
I watched as the two young men made it clear that they had, above anything else, swagger.
I watched as they swagged their way out the door so hard that my newly-purchased-long-awaited-for-more-precious-than-gold-and-worth-all-the-spit-up-on-the-shoulder-a-person-can-humanly-stand bookcase… toppled over and fell to the pavement with a crash.
Wood splintered everywhere and my shoulders fell so far they rivaled The Berlin Wall.

I didn’t pay for it, not monetarily. But my hopes and dreams paid dearly. You think I’m being dramatic, but if you savor books like I do… you understand. The ending result of the little mishap was that my precious books, my limited library, was boxed up and put in storage.

There was NO ROOM in the Inn.

I’ve spent the last 4 years looking for one and saving for one. They’re $100 and it seems that whenever we have $100 to get a solid one that will last… something else comes up.
The car needs a couple tires.
The computer gets a virus.
The children need food.
*sigh*

So my bookcase was a Christmas miracle indeed. I spent 4 hours “playing” with it yesterday, and I didn’t bother telling my husband I had his drill. When he called home to let me know he was coming home from work, he asked what I was doing.
“Putting my bookcase together,” I replied.
“WHAT? I was going to help with that…” I couldn’t tell if he sincerely wanted to HELP or if he was worried I’d mess my present up beyond repair. Or both. If true, his fear of my messing up is completely validated, by the way.
“I GOT this. I want to do it by myself.”

I’ve learned in my marriage to do these things on my own. They frustrate the living snot out of my husband -not that he isn’t mechanically minded or capable… he just hates how the instructions can be so vague or in another language entirely.
Then there’s me.
Instructions? Optional.
Which is why I messed up a few times, and which is ALSO why there’s some highly visible screws on a few of the shelves.
But guess what? It took me over four hours but:

I wasted no time in getting my books on the shelves, and was devastated to find that a bunch of our books suffered water-damage from a slight flood in our storage unit last year. We didn’t realize the storage unit had flooded until a few weeks later.
A few books had to be tossed out entirely.
A few are warped.
Most of them are right as rain, ironically.

From where I sit on my bed, I can see them all now. My precious little library of knowledge, from Calvin and Hobbes to Dickens to Dr. Laura… oh how I’ve missed you.

Mommy promises to never trust men with swagger again, okay?