Our Books Are Here!

In a previous blog post about my recent trip back to Singapore, I mentioned that I was shipping 240+kg worth of books to the U.S.. Well, they're here! They arrived in a series of deliveries over the course of 3 weeks. Otherwise, I would have piled them all up and taken a photo. Our existing bookshelves wouldn't come close to holding all these books. And I would have to reinforce the floor of our ground-floor library so that it wouldn't collapse into the basement! What to do? Why, make a basement library, of course. The basement has a concrete foundation, no need for more reinforcement. Its temperature, being underground, is a consistent 16-20C. I had previously installed a dehumidifier so that it will be dry for storage, perfect for books. Being hidden away in the basement, we don't have to care about looks of the shelves and concentrated on load bearing capacity. We went to the university's Property Disposition facility and picked up 5 used office shelving units. They are usually about US$180 when new, but were going for US$45 each. We had to rent a truck to bring them all back to the house, but that was only US$70. The 2 shelves on the left contain my books, while the 3 on the right are reserved for Jia Nin's. I've been shifting to electronic books over the past few years, so I only collect books that I really, really want to keep. My entire e-book collection can fit on one single backup USB hard drive! Ah, progress.