Not us!
We don’t watch movies except for very, very rarely, and don’t own a screen. The kids also don’t play videogames. We read or pursue music, gardening, blacksmithing, blackberry picking, working out, painting and other hobbies instead. I don’t want to be normal and am unimpressed with modern entertainment and find it less than worthless.
In the living room of the house we rent there was a built-in entertainment center with some cabinets and bookshelves around a big gap in the middle where a normal person would put his propaganda transmitter television.
After waiting two years, I finally bought a tablesaw last week and made a bookshelf for my daughter, then decided to fill in that TV gap with something worthwhile – more shelves!
That entire center was just a 49.5″ wide opening. Now it fits three tiers of books! As you can see, the books on the shelves were already overflowing, and there were more homeschooling books crammed in the cabinets. I also had a full box of mostly agriculture-related books we didn’t have room for before this operation. All of them now have a home.
The shelves are 12″ deep and almost 12″ in height, made from birch 3/4″ plywood. I cut 1.5″ strips to box in the plywood with so it matched the rest of the entertainment center. The entire operation, including painting, took about four hours.
Tomorrow I hope to build another 4″ x 6″ bookshelf for the dining room, then we should have more than enough room for all our books. For now. We seem to get more every week.
Back in our old North Florida house I built a bunch of bookshelves from cinderblocks and dimensional lumber.
Now I’m getting fancy, with actual plywood and routered slots for the shelving. It’s more efficient on space, but more expensive – especially with the cost of lumber right now. It also takes longer to make the shelves, but hey – we’re not watching TV so we’ve got time.
I used to read on my smart phone but got rid of it early this year. Physical books are safe from being censored or deleted and there’s nothing like reading a real paper book by the light of an oil lantern.
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
4 comments
Totally with you on the physical books. I completely stopped buying digital and have focused on building our physical library for the past few years. Over 1500 fiction, nonfiction, and reference books are on the shelves to be used and passed down.
That’s the way to do it.
Amen. I never touch the digital books or e-readers. I can’t get my brain into “read mode” with a screen. I tend to skim and jump around between windows. Reading a real book is a completely different experience.
We also don’t own a traditional TV, (though we do have a weekly movie night on a big computer monitor). I’ve lost my ability to even tolerate the sound of commercials, network newscasters, ads for new episodes of the vapid shows currently being aired.
I’m hoping to eventually build some wooden bookshelves like the ones pictured in your post. I might have to salvage some old wood but I’m sick of mass-produced manufactured glue-and-wood-pulp shelving. Until then we’ve got more than 90 boxes of books that we packed up when we moved, and no place to put most of them. You need an obscene amount of shelving to house that many books…
Yeah, that is a lot of books. And building shelves is expensive.
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