Ok, so the armoire is all but finished – all but the skirting boards around the bottom sides. We even went toddling off to a favorite antique store (Back Alley Antiques, on Thousand Oaks, just short of Blanco) in search of a key …my daughter had taken off the lock/latch to clean it up, and I had the idea to take it Back Alley Antiques – which has has lovely and original items, and usually rather reasonably priced, although I will only be able to indulge myself there if and when my books start selling like Fifty Shades of Grey (hah!). I did a talk there a couple of years ago for members of a book club who all appreciated antiques. Anyway, we took the lock/latch with us, and explained the situation to the manager – who immediately brought out a large box of skeleton keys, said that we were very clever to have thought of bringing the latch – and let us sort through the box to find one which fit! It took us about five minutes to find several that did, another five minutes to make certain that one was the best. I am still not quite sure how I got the idea that an antique store might have a box of odd keys laying around – maybe from when I worked at Talbot’s, and we had a box of odd and ornamental buttons that had come off things?

Now comes the fun part – aside from reconstructing and recreating the skirting boards – that of building a small set of removable shelves to fit into the armoire. There is no possible way to acquire something commercially available to fit, and no way that I can currently afford something custom-built … so, off to a local Home Depot with some measurements, and the services of a husky youth who was qualified to rip pieces of the required dimensions of cabinet-grade plywood from a single $34 sheet of same on the lovely mechanical saw available on request … yes, you can get pieces cut to exact dimensions at Lowe’s and Home Depot, as long as you don’t get too … well, demanding about it all. This is a useful thing to know, I think, since I have only a circular saw, and a small hobby jigsaw, able to easily handle soft wood of about a 1/4th inch. The husky youth was obliged by company rules and a scrupulous conscience to cut nothing smaller than 6 inches, so we brought home all the scraps, and my cunning plan is to appeal to our neighbor, the woodworker with a garage full of woodworking tools, to rip the rest of it into 5 ½ inch lengths … from which I will construct a series of shelves: one fixed shelf, sized to fit DVDs, and two half-width shelves which shall slide back and forth, allowing the DVD library to be easily searched … and the flat-screen TV to sit on the top of the shelving unit.

And when it becomes necessary for the armoire to be an armoire again – why, the unit can be easily moved out. Details to follow…I am building this bit by bit. Not a carpenter, you know – I’m just an English major!