I’m happy to say that the little free library has finally been installed in a public place, and there have been some changes!

While I’m not pleased with the timeline (it’s been nearly 2 years!!), I am glad that the library is now being used by the community.

Context

The Little Free Library was originally constructed back in 8th grade for a community service project. You can learn more about that After I finished construction, my teammates found a location for the library. It was going to be on county land, part of a new “green” area that the city had setup. There were several great characteristics: Sunny (for the solar panel), walkable (we wanted it to get decent use), close to a teammate (for easier maintenance of the library).

However, soon after the completion of the Library, Covid-19 happened. The city stopped returning my emails, and after almost a year of nothing, I decided that it was time to move on. With all three of us now in different high schools, I asked my teammate to drop the library off at my house, and it would be my responsibility to get it installed somewhere.

Once I got the library back home, I noticed several issues with the library. In order to keep the battery charged, I told my friend to keep the library outside, meaning for 8 months the library was exposed to the elements. My construction techniques were tested, and there were some areas that I figured would fail.

Initial Mistakes

The biggest example of this was during the initial construction of the library, I decided to paint each piece individually, to prevent water from wicking up into the plywood via the cut edges. Because of this, wood glue couldn’t be used when assembling the library. I used various brackets, with caulking between each piece to seal the library. But while applying the caulking, I did not tape around the joint, and 2 ugly, prominent beads of caulking dried on either side of the joint. As the deadline was nearing, I needed to cover this up, and used what I had on hand, drywall joint compound. Smearing some over the joint, feathering it out, another coat of paint, and you could hardly see my mistake. But being latex paint, this solution was destined to fail, because even the tiniest chip would allow water into the pocket of joint compound.

Sure enough, water had entered the various pockets of drywall joint compound, turned it into slush, and caused the rest of the paint over top to wrinkle.

School project 2.0?

At this point, I was busy with school and didn’t have the time to work on the restoration of the library. But once summer break began and I found myself doing nothing else that was productive, I started to fix up the library. I also knew that in 10th grade, a personal project was required. I made sure that piggybacking on a previous school project was allowed, and to my delight, that was even a suggestion for the personal project, “extension to previous service as action project”. So yes, a driving force behind this library finally getting installed was, in fact, another school requirement. But, I did start the restoration on the library before I knew that I could use it for the project, and I would have gotten the library restored and installed regardless. Just maybe not as expeditiously.