Repair

Earlier this week my wife spotted this modular bookcase in a local shop, it was only €130. It looked okay so we bought it on the spot. Yesterday we we went and collected it. My wife and her mother spent most of the day washing it (it was pretty grubby) and then applying varnished wood polish to it.

Today we tried to re-assemble it to discover that there were issues... Some of the ledges/runners were broken, so I had to find bits of wood to patch it with (shown here being held in place while the glue cures). Over the years the wood had shrunk so the metal lugs that run in the groves came out, so I have to carefully remove the brass parts and then insert a small wooden shim to make the lugs stick out more. Finally I had to stain the bits of pine back to some semblance of teak/oak colour...

Overall it was a few hours work and interesting, requiring a bit of creativity to make it work but it was definitely worth it. A new one of these costs around €1 000, and probably isn't made out of oak or teak like this one is.

For the curious it's a stack of Bibliothèque MD units. The company was started in Paris in the 1920s by a librarian for people at home to protect their books. As you buy more books you buy more units, and as time passed more features were added. It's a sort of Ikea Billy Bookcase but made out of real wood (solids and ply) instead of particleboard and fibreboard. They were made well into the 1980s when the name was finally phased out. Modern imitations are still available in France, but a lot more than €130.

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