karinoyo

In the past two, three weeks, it’s been a flurry of activity around here — okay, mostly me creating lots and lots of dust, and CP hiding in his study dealing with midterms. (Although once those passed, then it was onto dealing with finals coming up fast.)

This all began because — after being stalled for about four weeks or so while I worked up the energy — I finally masterminded moving the CDs from their place on the string of shelves to some alternate home. CP had been talking about needing more bookshelves (I swear, my life has become a revolving door of “need more shelves, we have enough now, no, need more shelves”…) and I’d rather use the Ikea Billy shelves to hold books than buy bookshelves even more cheap than the Billy shelves, which aren’t really that cheap after all when you consider we’ve had them for about 6 years now and they’re all still in awesome shape despite the loads we’ve put on them and the number of times we’ve moved them around.

Plus, CD storage design really bugs me because it’s almost always double-depth. That is, if you look at, say, Ikea’s storage options, it’s usually either an inset or a “to be placed beside” bookcase shelves: which are standard depth of 11.5in or so, but CDs only need 6in. I didn’t mind Ikea’s original CD inserts, which naturally they’ve discontinued for some blisteringly stupid reason (although they’re easy enough to fabricate out of thick foamcore, using the originals as patterns). A simple box-like insert, it did set the second layer of CDs back 6in, which could get difficult at night if the light didn’t shine into the shelf but only at it… things you don’t notice until you’re in the middle of using, design-wise.

That said, design-wise, part of the reason this kind of CD-solution bugged me was because the varying depth of the CDs meant you saw a line of CDs and then a line of slightly-shadowed CDs, instead of seeing an unbroken wall of CDs — the latter, I find, tends to be less obtrusive because your eye sees it as solid. The former implies a depth, so you’re not just seeing space is being used but that there’s more space being used — you can see that it “goes back farther”, somehow. That’s probably why the current Ikea-Billy-inserts all present a solid face rather than setting the second level back 6in, but in that case, I think: why not just have shelves only 6in deep, instead of using 12in of floor space to store 6in of stuff?

Okay, so being stingy about an extra 6in of floor space may seem stingy, and it’s not like we’re necessarily hurting for room to put stuff, but still. It’s the visual of it, more than anything else, because our understanding of whether a room is “big” or “small” often has less to do with the actual room dimensions and everything to do with how we occupy it, and how we interpret the placement of objects also occupying the space. Y’know, like how rooms get mysteriously smaller once stuff goes in them: if we could truly grok the size/shape of a room as an objective practice, then the addition of stuff in the right way shouldn’t affect our perception at all, but it does (and in both directions, at that — wow, it feels bigger, it feels smaller).

And it doesn’t help that a) we have lots of CDs and I mean LOTS of ‘em and b) there’s a major trade-off between being able to store a lot in a small space versus being able to use them efficiently. Sure, if you only want to store something then you can get more creative on design because you’re mostly storing the item(s) in the most efficient way and the only external design element is how neatly you camouflage it… but if you want to also use the item? Cripes. Plus, how to store something with an eye towards accessible, efficient use without turning the item into this massive eye-pain of “wow, you’ve got a lot of X.”

I would consider putting doors on any CD storage except for two issues. One is that the point of horizontal unbroken CD storage is to see a full line of CDs without the eye constantly being interrupted by verticals which the brain then has to process as not-a-CD… think of in libraries, where the standard metal shelves are designed to present no verticals except at the very ends of the shelves. Your brain can see book, book, book, from one end to the other without pausing even momentarily to skip over a non-book break.

This is, incidentally, why we turned up our noses at the current Ikea-style CD inserts, which are effectively lots of little 6in boxes… for the design reason from my end, and from the pragmatic reason from CP’s end that those verticals take up space, which reduces the # of CDs you can store and when you’ve got as many as we’ve got, you need every last blooming inch possible.

The second reason for no doors is due to the space-restriction when you’re using them. If the doors swing open, then that means the length of an unbroken run is limited by how wide an opening you can manage for, say, two doors. The weight of the door is going to limit the width, obviously; the heavier/wider the door, the larger a vertical needed to hold the larger hinge needed to carry that door weight. Like a 30in cabinet, which means two doors at approx 15in each, a vertical, two more doors and another run of 30in, etc.

If you only have enough CDs to fill a single 30in bookshelf from floor to ceiling, then this might not be an issue — assuming of course that you don’t mind getting down on your knees to see the CDs on the very bottom, or standing on a freaking chair to see the CDs stored 68in above the floor. I’m five-six, and frankly storing CDs anywhere above maybe 70in is my limit unless this hypothetical design includes some kind of built-in stepstool. (I’m not saying I can’t see them, just that it’s a lot harder to read the itty-bitty labels on the stupid CDs at that angle or greater.)

Assuming that doors aren’t an issue in terms of getting to the CDs — that is, that a limit of a 30in run of CDs won’t result in one entire wall being consumed by nothing but double doors — then there’s still the issue of the doors themselves. They need room to swing: and 15in may not seem like a lot but when you start adding other objects into the room, suddenly you realize that an open door taking up 15in of space also needs more space around it for anyone to move between you and the nearby chair or sofa, a table, whatever. (I always think of the kitchens I’ve known in which galley-style seems really efficient until you open the dishwasher door and suddenly no one can get past, and for which the base cabinets opposite the dishwasher can’t be opened until the dishwasher is closed. Sheesh.)

Accordion doors require room for the accordion to pile up, and that means building out the end-piece if it’s against a wall so those 3 layers of 3/8in ply have some place to hang out. I get the design use of bifold or trifold doors but when those same doors don’t actually get out of the way of the actual opening, it’s annoying. Doors that open up are really only feasible if it’s a short vertical stretch because otherwise you have to step back quite a distance to get the door past you — usually limited to about 15in height, the same as most kitchen upper cabinets that have upswing doors. Obviously not the best option for covering shelves at your kneecaps, since then you can’t just kneel but must get down and bend over to see under the door. Ridiculous. And sliding doors will always block from view the equivalent of a single door’s width, so you can’t actually see the full run of shelves even if structurally the shelves have no prominent verticals.

Sure, there’s rolltop-style doors, which I think look absolutely ugly and bring back bad design memories of houses using those fake-leather/plastic/vinyl whatever accordion doors (which this house had but were likely removed prior to us buying the house). Doors that slide up (or down) might be possible, but that relies on having the vertical space and/or making sure whatever’s above/below doesn’t protrude and prevent the doors from sliding, like say, when you’re using that last 26in of wall space above the usable CD-storage area for display.

Which is a long and thinking-outloud way to get around to saying that I finally just snagged some really cheap MDF, three or four 1×2s, and came up with a temporary system that stores the CDs along the fireplace wall. With the brick backing taking up 4in, and the mantle at about 10in depth, it means the 6in depth for the CDs slides perfectly into the space between mantle and floor almost seamlessly. And since the brick was already giving a “something is taking up this space” visual impression, the CDs are just more of the same.

Yeah, it’s not pretty — and I’ll prove it as soon as I can upload the pictures I just took — but it works for now, and will probably stay until I can come up with a pleasing (and sturdy) shelf design to create built-ins around the fireplace.

Best of all, the shelves that were dominating the east end of the living room have been moved to the guest bedroom, which had the only unbroken & available length of wall great enough to hold them. It eats up a foot of the floor space in that room but it’s room for book expansion that we really needed…

For now, at least, we’re once again ahead of the book monster. I don’t expect that to last long, though, so I’m already trying to figure out where else I can squeeze in more shelves. Sigh. I really think when it comes time to sell this house that we’re going to need a real estate agent willing to ditch the usual “good starter home” kind of label and re-classify the house as “only book-lovers need apply” or something.

Tagged: media, renovation, storage