The Day I Had To Eat My Words

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This is the bookcase I have in my sewing corner. It holds some of my sewing supplies and other stuff.

It used to look like this

I didn’t have all the shelves in it when I snapped the photo. But you get the idea

It’s an inexpensive piece from Target. The back was basically a piece of cardboard that came folded in half. And we had to put it on and apply this ‘seam cover’.

You can kind of see the center seam in this closeup.

When we built a house in 1988, we had a bunch of v-groove pine shiplap left over from the ceilings. Mr. Redoux kept it all these years. In case you didn’t do the math - that’s 32 years!! I wonder how long that is in ‘board years’…..

Over the years we moved it from house to house to house. Never really knowing what, if anything, we would ever use it for.

I gave him a lot of grief about it too. ‘Why are we keeping this old wood??’ ‘When are we ever going to use it??’ ‘Do we really need to schlep it with us every time we move???’

You see, Mr. Redoux likes to hang onto things….

At first we kept it inside the garage to keep it protected from the elements. Then after about 20 years of it being in the way all the time (the boards were 16 feet long!), it ended up stacked up out in the back of our property.

And when we moved from Northern California down here to So Cal? Wouldn’t you know — all that wood made the 500 mile trip down here with us!

Now that’s the definition of TENACITY.

So the other day I decided I was going to redo this bookcase. And the first thing I said was ‘hey, where’s all that pine shiplap we have??’

You should have seen the look of satisfaction on Mr. Redoux’s face….

So we replaced the cardboard back with the weathered pine. Then I white-washed it. And I painted the bookcase with chalk paint and distressed it.

And here it is

I’ve heard of a saying that goes something like, ‘MAKE SURE YOUR WORDS ARE ALWAYS SOFT AND SWEET BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU MIGHT HAVE TO EAT THEM’.