Sandy hit us very hard. We had to pull out the floors and walls of our living room, dining room and kitchen. Just for the heck of it, we tore out a lot of the ceilings as well. A lot of our furniture went into the trash. Some survived. For example, I have an ancient oak bookcase that I inherited from my grandfather. Sadly, it's pretty small. For the bulk of my book collection I had two huge bookcases I'd bought at Costco years ago. They were sort of a hybrid--a chipboard back with what appeared to be real wood shelves. Alas, they didn't make it.
My wife was not nearly as upset as I that the bottom two shelves of my books were garbage. She'd been urging me to shed my collection for years, but I couldn't bear it. For about three months, we've had huge boxes of books cluttering up our dining room, and I had no place to put them.
I really looked for a half-decent bookcase, but all I could find were small things of dubious quality in the $3-400
