Wednesday, July 30, 2014

tomorrow, i'm going to finally start building the rest of the furniture i need in this place: several large bookshelves and a few tables. i simply can't find anything i could substitute in the way i want it on kijiji.

i've been waiting for a year to do this, so i'm a little excited about it. i've got a lot of measuring to do...

i was initially counting on a small but regular sum coming from my stepmother to deal with the extra furniture. well, i say that without a lot of seriousness. it was something my father had indicated was important to him, and there was a verbal agreement reached on his instigation, but i really knew better than to take it seriously. he'd indicated to me a few times that she wasn't listening to him and his wishes weren't likely to be carried out, and i knew it was more than the morphine talking. he tried, but the truth is he knew as well as i did that she wasn’t going to honour anything she didn't sign and she wasn't going to sign anything...

i probably wouldn't have moved here in the first place if i was taking that seriously. i think i *did* think she'd give it a few months, at least. either way, it never materialized.

so, then i was waiting for the tax return to come in. but they're splitting it up on a monthly basis. so, instead of getting $650 in one chunk that i could spend on furniture amongst other things, i get bit a more than $50 a month, starting last month. which means i'd have to go to the hardware store and buy some wood every month for the next three or four months, or save it up until next spring. annoying...

it turns out the landlord doesn't want to pay me interest on my rent deposit, so he's giving it back to me this month. that is, i don't pay rent this month. he knows i'm not going anywhere, so the last month scenario is pretty unlikely. and, he's not going to immediately evict me for missing a month, either. three, probably...

so, that gives me some extra disposable income, and the cash i need to get the stuff built.

i actually don't have a clue what this is going to cost. i'm just going to measure what i need and go down and find out. but i figure there's not more than $20 worth of wood in any single thing i want to build, so i'm guessing $150 absolute max and probably something more like $75. the question is going to arise as to how much is going to end up as waste. but i'll figure out something to do with any extra pieces i get.

i'm also going to have to get a drill. i could screw through particle board, but i can't screw through heavier wood. and i'm mostly going to be making the stuff ikea style, which means drilling holes into the wood and then screwing it together with dowels and stuff.

i mean, i don't otherwise know how to make furniture. shelves are pretty intuitive; the key is just making sure everything's orthogonal. i've put together enough ikea stuff, though, that i can reverse engineer the idea and apply it to the rest of it.