Idiot

The office bookcase project continues at a (surprisingly) steady pace. The end cabinets are up, as are the shelves, and I've actually got a few books acting as placeholders. Looking in my office, the casual observer can now actually tell what's going on and taking shape. It looks like a bookcase, albeit a skeletal one.

The other week, when the heavy lumber phase kicked in, my brother looked at my work and offered the observation, "Holy crap! Are those 2x12s? What are you trying to do--stop a car from crashing through your office!?" I calmly replied that I don't do things in half measures, and that when I build a bookcase, I build it to stand the test of time. But yeah, now that you mention it, since my office is in the front of the house, stopping runaway cars is a useful secondary role for it.

So last night I'm installing the corner shelves--they are diamond-shaped, and bear more than a passing resemblance to Superman's "S" shield--and giving a combination nail/glue treatment to the little support braces that are to prevent the shelves from sagging back in the corner. I'm using 2-inch long finishing nails to anchor the supports, which is working very well going through the sheetrock into the wall studs. Except. Like the idiot I am, I utterly and completely forgot about the big "window" between the living room and my office that I covered up and converted into an alcove with shelves on the living room side. Remember that? So I'm happily nailing the supports up, and then head to the kitchen to get some iced tea (putting up shelves is thirsty work). Coming back from the kitchen, I see a vertical row of CDs--one on each shelf--dangling precipitously on the edge of falling. Puzzled, I try to push them back into place. Nothing doing. So I pull them down to see what the obstruction is, and find myself looking at the business end of more than an inch of nail sticking straight through the wall. I'd closed the window with 3/4 inch plywood, and while that's good and thick, it's not thick enough to handle 2-inch long finishing nails. With much grumbling, I removed all the affected CDs and awkwardly hammered the nails back through to whence they came, eventually replacing them--with much additional awkward effort--with suitably shorter ones.

Doesn't change the fact that I'm an idiot that manages to find incredibly creative ways to waste both time and effort.

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