Living in the Scoot Utopia

My friend Ken has an assload of DVDs. Literally hundreds. And for years they have been mostly unusable, stored in boxes and giant plastic tubs because there was just no place else to put them.

For as many years he has dreamed of having an entire wall converted into a built-in display case to house all these DVDs. But, each time he'd get close to this dream, something (usually moving) would scuttle the project.

So this past weekend he decided to go for it. Since I've done some minor construction before he called upon my "expertise", and I headed over on Saturday morning to get started.

After staring at the wall for a bit and brainstorming he sketched up a simple line drawing of what he wanted. Based upon the design he presented, I took measurements of the actual space and then began my calculations. After a little while I had a revised drawing indicating how many shelves could actually fit into the space.

With the drawing in hand, I then calculated out how many cuts of wood I'd need and at what dimensions, how many L-brackets, how many screws, etc.

The final shopping list:

• 34 pieces of lumber, cut into 11 different lengths
  
• 124 L-braces
  
• 31 long wood screws
  
• 249 short wood screws
  
• 12 long nails
  
• 11 finishing nails
  
• paint
  

We headed off to Home Depot with the shopping list, a trip that would take nearly 3 hours. After finding the appropriate lumber we discovered it was a quarter inch thicker than I had estimated, so I had to redo all my calculations. Next was the Tetris-like task of figuring out the smallest combination of various sizes of boards to buy that could be cut into all the lengths we needed. Then it came time to find some poor schlub to do the cutting.

The first chump we found told us it would take a day to do and we'd have to leave the wood behind and come pick it up the next day. We believed him. But after getting passed from desk to desk trying to find someone to write up a cutting order, Customer Service found us a some young kid to talk to back in lumber. He looked at our order, said "no problem," and had it all cut for us in about 20 minutes.

We got back to Ken's house and I prepared to anchor the first support board to the wall. Ken handed me his drill.

"Ok, where's the drill bits?" I asked.

He handed me a phillip's screwdriver bit.

"No, the other kind," I said.

He then flipped it over to reveal a flat-blade screwdriver.

"No, I need actual drill bits," I said.

"Oh, I don't have any of those," he replied.

So, back to Home Depot we went. :)

Once we returned, I decided that before getting into the construction I'd first fix the faulty wiring in his kitchen light switch that had been driving me crazy. Then, with that repair made, I got to work and found the going to be quite a bit easier than I expected.

I began by mounting boards to his walls to anchor the shelves to. I then anchored the main central support across the top of his fireplace, erected the four primary vertical supports, and then added the first row of shelves to stabilize it:

Once that was in place, I was able to continue adding shelves. But I quickly discovered that the kid at Home Depot wasn't quite as precise with his cuts as I'd hoped, as the board lengths deviated by as much as 3/4" from the intended lengths. Fortunately I had brought my power saw so we were able to make minor corrections as needed.

By 10:30pm I was exhausted, so I organized the remaining lumber by intended purpose, gave Ken detailed instructions about how to proceed, and let him have at it so I could go home.

Around 3am he emailed me that it was finished, and on Sunday, he painted.

Last night I went over to play video games and I was astonished when I saw the finished piece. It looked better than I had anticipated, and except for a minor glitch of miscounting and being 2 boards short (which Ken fixed Sunday with a third trip to Home Depot), I was impressed by how well my ScooterMath™ had prevailed once again. :)

Here's the finished result, with most of the lighting installed and about half of his DVD collection in place:

UPDATE: Here's it is with all the lighting installed and all the DVDs put in place...

Not too bad if I do say so myself!