Okay, I admit it: once I got past the incredibly tedious “making books” section of this project, it ended up being quite a lot of fun, and the whole project probably took 12-14 hours over three or four days, including the early part where I glued some furniture together and then didn’t touch it again for a month. And now that it’s finished it looks great on the bookshelf, although I’m probably going to turn the lights off once the motion sensor in the front starts becoming annoying.
I still have a Lego set to put together in the next couple of days, so I probably ought to figure out where I’m going to put it when it’s done.
If anybody has any questions about the build, let me know. Those are rubber bands in that one picture; one of the walls was just the tiniest bit warped and I needed everything to squeeze together a bit while the glue set.
My apologies to David Foster Wallace, but never has a stolen (and lightly edited) headline been more appropriate for one of my posts, and I’m including the time I ripped off Roger Ebert.
If you spend time on TikTok, and specifically if you spend time on TikTok interacting with book accounts (“BookTok”), you have absolutely seen some ads for these cool little bookend diorama things at some point or another. I tried to find the actual ad so that I could embed it and was unsuccessful; it’s basically a video of someone putting the thing together with — and this is important — lots of satisfying-sounding clicks and snaps as he puts things together.
TikTok’s algorithm has me dialed in in a way I have never seen from any form of advertising before, guys. I have bought more shit because I saw it in an ad on TikTok than I have from any advertising source ever, and it’s not close. Do you happen to remember that metal scorpion from last summer? TikTok. The brand of shoes I’ve been wearing for the last, like, three years? TikTok. My wife? TikTok.
Okay, maybe not that one.
I had previously opened the box for my library bookend and closed it back up three or four times, having forgotten every time just how much a pain in the ass the initial few pages of the instructions looked to be. You see, there’s no clicking anywhere in this build. No snapping. What there is, is a whole fuckton of gluing. God, so much gluing. And cutting with scissors. And more gluing. And sanding. And holding things together at precisely the right angle until the glue sets. And more gluing.
Those books up there? That took three and a half hours. Each of those books is a separate piece of wood, which had to be popped out of a larger piece of wood, sanded down, and then the individual covers had to be cut apart with scissors, and then the covers had to be glued to the pieces of wood, and then the individual books had to be glued together to make the piles, meaning that 90% of the art on the book covers was going to be be completely obscured. All of those books have full front and back covers! You’ll never see them, because they’re glued to each other!
And then, because that wasn’t enough, there are the books in front, which are made by taking a 10″ piece of full-color printed paper, spindling it together to make mock pages, then gluing that together and gluing it inside a book cover, meaning that the books will never be opened, and the, again, legitimately cool designs on the pages will never be seen. That barrel in the back? Two pieces of wood glued together, then four full-cover newspaper pages (well, one was a map and one was, rather inexplicably, a massively oversized postcard) that had to be cut out, rolled as tightly as possible (I’m actually kind of proud of how good a job I did rolling them) and then glued in such a way that they won’t unroll when placed inside the barrel. Again, 90% of the art will never be seen.
I originally planned to finish this thing today and then do a post about the entire build, but again: that was three and a half hours and it was tedious as fuck. The rest of the build, in theory, looks more fun, and I’ve put some of the furniture and such together, but … Christ. This had better look Goddamned amazing when I’m finished with it.
Ironically, I just snarked on Twitter about an article on how millennials are shit at DYI. Nonetheless:
I’m putting the new pool ladder together. Anybody have a better idea than needle-nose pliers on how to tighten those nuts? The bolt is smooth on the outside so I can’t go at it from there and no wrench on Earth will fit inside the plastic.
I had all sorts of plans for this morning; “spend over an hour watching a guy build a clock by hand on YouTube” was not part of those plans, and now the terribly fascinating and erudite blog post I had in mind is lost to the winds.
So here. You need to see all of this too. Have the first three videos. SPOILER ALERT: There are fifteen videos here, and the damn clock’s not done yet. Try not to let that fact ruin your life like it did mine.
(If you only watch one, or you THINK you’re only going to watch one, start with #3. Watching someone make screws by hand is fascinating.)
Was planning on heading into school today again, but last night we finally got sick of the carpet in the hallway and ripped the shit out. When we first bought the place a friend who lives down the street came over and commented that she’d had the same carpet in her place when they moved in and we were going to hate it. Man, she couldn’t have been more right. I’m generally a fan of carpet over hardwood (and this hallway, which bends off to the left at the top of the picture, will eventually have two runners in it) but this shit looked muddy and disgusting within just a couple of weeks of us moving in. And this isn’t even one of the dog zones in the house; they don’t spend a lot of time in this part of the house and we’re generally not wearing shoes when walking through this hallway either. But the carpet looked filthy nonetheless.
There was already hardwood in my office and the boy’s room; our room is carpeted, but with a different kind of carpet than what was in the living room and hallway (and, for that matter the dining room) and it’s in much better shape, so we’re going to keep it. We pulled up the carpet and the padding last night and I spent about an hour and a half this morning ripping tack strips out from by the walls; a bit of consultation with the Internet and Facebook sent me off to buy a couple of prybars this morning that worked wonderfully. We just need to buy and install a few guards for where the hardwood meets the carpet in the bedroom, the tile in the entryway, and the linoleum in the bathroom. I was worried that the hardwood was going to be all stained and nasty, but other than a little bit along the wall (look to the left of the vacuum cleaner) that I’m hoping will come up, it looks as good as the flooring in the bedrooms. Not bad for an hour and a half of work.
Getting some control over the ten thousand different kinds of flooring in this house is becoming more and more necessary. 🙂
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