This particular saga started at a grand car booter at Hook Road on the 26th August last year when I picked up a collection of Morse DVD's for £15, a good buy but coming in two presentation cardboard boxes with which I was not very happy.
But first, before I could do anything about that, one of the DVDs went missing, perhaps falling foul of a nocturnal excursion of the vacuum cleaner. So not only was one of the DVDs a misfit, not from the uniform edition, another one was actually missing. So earlier this year I got around to ebay and was able to purchase a replacement for the sum of 99p, which was not bad as the vendor had to find some packaging and stump up £3.40p for postage.
So then I moved onto to the matter of the box and came up with that illustrated. The bottom is a substantial if rather damaged piece of an oak bookcase from north London, the two ends are rather less damaged oak from a bookcase from Cambridge and the sides started life in some flat pack or other, exactly which flat pack being lost to oblivion. My mother would not have been pleased to think that her upstairs personal bookcase (the downstairs bookcase was more or less devoted to my father's books) housing such treasures as the works of Aldous Huxley (an important person in her young woman hood) had now been dismantled to serve this present purpose.
I thought that stain & varnish were needed to make the box look a little less DIY. Turned up and applied some 'Jacobean Dark Oak' stain which I thought was very Oxford College and should do very well. Then turned to the half empty tin of diamond hard floor varnish, to find that while not diamond hard it was very sticky, pretty much the texture of a packet jelly, the sort that one used to break up and use as sweets as a child. Not at all keen on buying new varnish so, instead, I added about half a pint of white spirit and half a pint of linseed oil, gave it a stir and after a couple of days the stuff seemed fine, with the result illustrated. The only irritant being the way the camera has picked up and highlighted the flaw in the varnish upper left: not nearly as bad as it looks here in real life. Time will tell whether the lubricating additions have really worked.
Penultimate step was to put box corners on, to stop the plywood sides pulling away with time and scuffs. First stop was the generally useful hardware store at Stoneleigh Broadway, but failing there pushed onto Ace Mica hardware opposite Amen Corner in Tooting (http://www.acemica.co.uk/) where I got them last time they were wanted for trestle tables - see July 11th 2011 in the other place. As it turned out, in the interval, they had stopped selling conventional box corners but the helpful assistant rummages around and turned up with those that can be seen above. I don't think that they are intended for this purpose, but for this particular box I think that they do better; a size and shape more in keeping with the look of the thing, less fussy. So, a result, well worth the trip, even if the wine bar opposite was firmly shut and I was unable to reprise their fine Austrian white.
The ultimate step is still pending, but BH has been tasked with finding some tasteful furnishing cord or rope to replace the sisal handle. The sort of thing that can be bought in John Lewis at Kingston, or the haberdashery in Epsom High Street, but which will probably be sourced from the bottom of some cupboard or other. Maybe even the roof.
In the meantime, I shall ponder about replacing the offending misfit and at 99p it is tempting. I could then move onto a spreadsheet to track our use of the Morsoleum and take bets on the lifetime maximum viewing of any one episode - given that, without having kept count, I should think some of them are at 5 already if we include regular freeview viewings.
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