Bye Bye Bookshelves

We have two bookshelves flanking the fireplace in the living room.


While I'm a big fan of built in furniture, and we obviously need lots of space to shelve our books, these particular bookshelves have a few problems.

• They significantly impede furniture arrangement. One entire wall is eaten up by the fireplace, bookshelves, and door. (And the other walls aren't much better.)
• They're not deep enough for most books. (This, despite being recessed into the wall.)
• The construction isn't very good. (You can't tell from the photo, but the bookshelves are sagging on either side of the fireplace. Although, to be fair, it's actually the house that's doing most of the sagging.)
• The aesthetics aren't that good. (Subjective, I know, but I've never liked the design of the shelves, and the proportions seem wrong.)

Tina's objection to removing them is that it will be a can of worms. I tell her that I have a plan, and I can get it done. Dad has long been an advocate for removing them, and today he got his wish.

Here's one final look, after all the books have been removed.


Demolition is not really the correct word for what needs to happen next. I like deconstruction, although the English majors have ruined it.

First we removed the face frame. Then we pried up the bottom shelf. I'm happy to see that the hardwood floor continues under the bookshelves.


With the face frame removed, we could collapse the two sides, then push down on the top.


Most people would just cover up this hole and be done with it. But wait! See how the back of the bookshelf is recessed into the wall? A bit of exploratory poking through the plaster confirmed my fear: homebuilders from 90 years ago did stupid things just like they do today.

The wall into which the bookshelves were recessed is a bearing wall that supports the two south bedrooms. Notching the studs without providing a way for the load to redistribute is a Bad Idea. Although the fact that the house is still standing is a pretty compelling argument that this sort of thing is actually not too bad, it makes me queasy to think of those little scraps of wood holding up the house, so it needs to be fixed, or at least improved.

In order to put in a header to redistribute the load, all that plaster and lath has to come out. It's messy work, but not nearly as bad as trying to pull down a crumbling ceiling.


Here's a closeup of the stud. Does that look like a 2x4? (rhetorical question)


I should mention that the wall between the living room and the kitchen has a quirk that I discovered while working on the kitchen ceiling. The wall needs to be thicker than usual to accommodate the waste pipe. I would have used 2x6s. The original builders used 2x4s and stacked up a half dozen pieces of lath to make up the difference. (That brittle lath is what the kitchen cabinets are attached to. Shudder.)

This is what should have been done in the first place: put in a header with jack studs on either side. Since we're filling in the hole, I added the studs in the middle.


The next step is to put up some sheetrock and plaster over the whole thing, but I don't have any scraps big enough. Since sheetrock is pretty cumbersome (and I'll need two sheets — one for each book shelf) I'll have to wait for Dad's next visit.

to be continued...