Cardboard Shelf

I admit this "project" is a bit of a cop out, but I'm on vacation this week, so I'm trying not to sit at a computer all day. Vacation, for me, used to mean that I would sit all day writing code for fun. Now, I get enough of that crap at work. If I'm not outside, then I'm building some sort of hardware or doing some other dumb, yet constructive, project, such as this marvelous testament to my genius: a cardboard shelf.

Here's the background. I have a lot of DVDs, and when I first moved into my apartment I had practically no shelf space. So, I had to store a whole bunch of my DVDs on the shelf in my hallway closet.

No problem, right? Wrong. The DVDs were all stacked above my head in columns. My friends came over, and we decided to watch one of my movies. The problem was that it was near the bottom of the stack in one of the center stacks. I had to dig it out, which of course caused all of the boxes to avalanche on top of me. That wasn't going to happen again.

I didn't have my tools or building materials yet, so I had to make due with what I had. I had a lot of cardboard from all of the shipping boxes and furniture shipments. I thought that if I could rig up a shelf using cardboard, I'd be fine. I couldn't find anything suitable to hold these shelves up. I figured that, since the weight would be distributed over the length of the cardboard, I could use other DVDs to hold up each shelf.

Cardboard Shelf 1

Cardboard Shelf 2

Yeah, that's right. I had Xena: Warrior Princess, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and 8 Mile next to each other. Needless to say, I sorted my DVDs later.

Using this free shelving, I was able to take a contiguous block of six seasons of DVDs out from the bottom row without any collapsing. If I had added another layer of cardboard between each row of DVDs, I probably could have take more at once, but it wasn't necessary.

I built a self since these pictures were taken, so I don't need to put all of my DVDs in my closet anymore.

I chose to post about this seemingly pointless "project" because I think it gives a good description about who am I and what this blog will contain. I swear the projects will become more interesting. I just wanted to post something other than the one other lonely post I already had.