How to make an attic library
The attic was a surprise.
I moved into my house sight unseen in the middle of the pandemic. Technically, I knew it *had* an attic, but it wasn’t included in the listing photos. It wasn’t until I got into the house — which almost didn’t happen, which is another story — that I realized how big the attic was. It’s vast.
It was also really, really dirty. So at first I was stymied — I didn’t know what to do but put a few boxes up there. Underneath the layers of dog hair and dust and cigarette butts on the floor were grime and sawdust and cigarette ash.
Once people were vaccinated and we could socialize safely, I’d bring friends up to the attic and ask them what they’d do with it. Art studio. Video game room. Pool table. Ping pong table. Master bedroom suite. Recording studio. It was a Rorschach test for people’s idle, big-space dreams.
Of course, me being me (former books editor at the LA Times, book critic and reporter, avid reader and physical book enthusiast), all along I was wondering if somebody could talk me out of turning it into a library.
Before it could be anything more than a dusty attic, I had to get it clean. If you’d knocked on my front door this summer, I wouldn’t have heard you because I was up in the attic with a shop vac cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. I used a couple of nails and twists of wire to get the ash/litebrite nuggets/sawdust/dirt out from between the floorboards. I don’t recommend this as a way to spend your summer, and probably I could have been a little less diligent about cleaning, but once I used a construction screw to pry out the first cigarette butt and realized how much filth was embedded there between the floorboards, I couldn’t unsee it. Not only was it dirty and gross, it gave off a vibe of neglect. The attic space had been used but carelessly. It needed rejuvenation.
Because the boards up there is more than a century old, they’re pretty worn out. To seal them I painted on a simple coat of amazing nontoxic floor finish (it’s made from whey. In Vermont). It needs a week to dry fully (or as people who know about these things say, to cure) so I came up with a scheme to finish in strips so I could put up bookcases and start shelving books while I was still at work deep cleaning other sections. Could I have started at one side and just worked my way across? Probably.
One of the things that was hardest for me with a space this big was figuring out what to put where. I’d spent a lot of time in the space trying to figure it out.
The photo above shows my plan: two rows of bookcases facing each other positioned so that they just reached the beams above. I knew I’d be using the standard Ikea Billy bookshelves, which are about 6 feet high (the white ones are $49 each, and I needed 7 8 10 of them). When you look at the picture below, you get a sense of how tall the attic is — 12 feet, maybe? Higher? I have a wicked tall ladder and I haven’t gotten high up enough to measure it.
I admit I’ve assembled Billy bookshelves so many times I could almost do it blindfolded. The tricky thing is getting the back panel to slide in after the frame is assembled, but if you’ve got a wide open space it’s super easy. Once the shelves were in position they basically created storage spaces behind, under the eaves. In my dreams instead of storage they’d be secret rooms accessed by expertly crafted bookshelves with hidden levers — but for that I’ll probably have to find a carpenter.
With DIY, I can take my optimistic enthusiasm and limited skills and tackle almost any project. I love learning how to do things with my hands other than turning a page or typing these words. But almost every DIY project is filled with unexpected challenges and delays, even when you’ve got a clear plan.
I’d packed my books more than a year before alphabetically, and numbered them sequentially, so I knew exactly what to unpack where. I’d started with the As downstairs and thought the attic would house M-Z. When I realized that I needed more bookshelves than I’d planned, I had to change the layout. To try different configurations, I unshelved and reshelved hundreds of books as I moved the 6-foot tall bookcases around, which is pretty awkward when you’re 5-foot-2.
And my systems were breaking down. Partway through the year I’d unpacked/repacked the Ms to catch up on the David Mitchell books I hadn’t read before I interviewed him for the paperback release of Utopia Avenue for the bookstore An Unlikely Story, so they were out of order. After I’d finally shelved from K-M, I found a box of Ls that I’d missed. Which meant making more space in the middle. Three times I had almost enough shelves, but not quite.
Supply chain issues meant the last bookcase I needed was nowhere to be found. I’d given up hope and reboxed the Hs and Is, putting them in the storage eave behind my summer dresses.
Then a stroke of luck: I had insomnia while visiting friends in NYC and checked at 4am to discover that a cache of a dozen white bookcases were in stock in a nearby Ikea in New Jersey. I didn’t leap up like a crazy person, but I was hopeful. Later that morning, when I arrived 40 minutes after the store opened, there were only 3 left. One came home to the Hudson Valley with me.
Finally, all my books had a place to rest and breathe.
The attic library currently runs from “The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution” by Peter Hessler to “Robert Altman: The Oral Biography” by Mitchell Zuckoff.
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