In the fall of 1984, Daddy and I built a set of bookcases for my dorm room at ETSU. They were a variation on something he'd seen in a Southern Living magazine. They consist of 4x4 "uprights" with shelf standard and brackets mounted on the back. They are not attached to the wall at all - the weight of the shelf contents keeps them stable. He added a number of twists to the design, including routing out a channel for the standards, wrapping the shelves past the uprights on the ends, and swapping 1x8 dimensional lumber for 1 1/2" plywood (two sheets glued together and edged to appear solid) for the shelves. They were sized for the bed platforms in my dorm room, and were a big hit when I installed them in my room at the beginning of my junior year.
They moved back and forth from Commerce to Marshall for two years (don't ask about the teddy bear in the first photo - there was a reason and it involved a girl but I can't remember the reason ... or the girl), then to three apartments in Austin and my house in Waco before eventually ending up back in Marshall after I finished law school and came home. They were always accompanied by my Blue Devils speaker stands (amazing what you can do with plastic trash cans, adhesive tape and paint markers), and sometimes had matching 4" blue stripes on the walls for my own variation on the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon heartbeat / Sky Ryders rainbow that we'd had in our first two dorm rooms at ET. (Just keep in mind that if I were in college today these oddball style decisions would be tatoos, not just memories).
Daddy added a matching coffee table (shown in the Waco and Austin pictures) and dining table when I moved to Austin in 1986. At some point they went back to Waco for my sister Emily to use with her family, and she repainted the uprights from ETSU blue to Coca-Cola dark red (she collects Coke stuff). She eventually sent them back to Daddy in Yantis, and weekend before last Parker and I drove up to get them out of storage for Grayson to use, as it's time for him to get a set of bookcases.
It took me a little over a week to find time to strip the red paint off. The underlying paint (which was covered with polyurethane which had yellowed) got pretty damaged in the process, so I got another can of the original color (SW Blue Coat - they had to look it up to get the formula) and primed and repainted the uprights. The attached photo shows one freshly repainted, one stripped and ready to be primed, and one ready to be stripped. Without the yellowed polyurethane they are startlingly blue, but that's the color Grayson said he wanted (and probably what they looked like for a number of years), so that's what I did. I put them up last night and we'll get them organized with his books, videos, toys, etc. over the next few days.