He said:

I’m looking at the picture of this book case wondering how the heck the bottom shelf is empty. Well, let me tell you, it isn’t now. (Also, that ugly green carpet, barf!) We were doing some rearranging and finding it hard to find a good place in our room for the books that will get read some day (winky face, lol!). So, the natural answer is to build something to suit our needs. The shelves are maple. The vertical pieces are Jacobean stained pine from a previous project. Going into this, I knew those long pieces of pine were twisted (as pine does) so I got out all my big powerful clamps to pull it all straight. Well, wood can be a stubborn thing so when I accidentally dropped the assembled unit all of my tight seams and fastening promptly popped and it fell apart like you can imagine in a cartoon. Well, that may be a bit dramatic but that’s how it felt. Anyway, I put it back together with the shelves in a more “loose” fitting way and used more heavy duty methods to partially straighten the whole thing out. The whole thing functions well and looks rather nice but I can still sense those twists staring me down.

She said:

My darling husband just doesn’t understand my book obsession. But he loves me enough to support my habit anyways. In redoing our bedroom, we had to be very intentional with the space use. Believe it or not, I actually did a MAJOR book purge in order to downsize to this beautiful custom-built bookcase. I think he hauled out three boxes of books! Of course, there is not a single empty space on it now. But that’s not the point. The point is that I LOVE having the ability to dream up a piece of furniture and have it materialize like this. He may grumble about twists and leans, but I adore this quirky bookshelf!