Old bleachers in the Rattlesnake School gym were torn out last year.
Old slate chalkboards at Franklin School and other Missoula schools were retrofitted with whiteboards.
“Russ is an artist, he's not just a carpenter,” said Anderson.
Swinger, carpentry foreman for Missoula County Public Schools, and Bill Edens finished installing the new/old library furniture late Thursday afternoon.
“This is a great way to wrap up the week,” Swinger said. “We're definitely up for this.”
Every scrap of wood, he said, 190 pieces in all, came from the Rattlesnake School bleachers that dated back to the 1940s or '50s.
The warm, honey-colored fir was offset by black slate panels that were chalkboards in a former life.
“This project is old-school,” Swinger said. “It's literally built of out of old school materials, and it's built the way craftsmen built furniture 100 years ago.”
Like the rest of 12-year-old Chief Charlo School, Missoula's newest elementary building set on the crest of the South Hills, the library is striking.
“It's one of the better libraries in the district, just with its view, location, its newness, and the thought process that went into it,” said Gary Botchek, director of operations and maintenance for MCPS.
But for Anderson, there was a problem. Her desk near the front door faced the hallway.
“So she was on her keyboard and the kids, of course, were goofing off behind her,” Swinger said.
Anderson, who will retire in June after 33 years of teaching, made do. But it took her a long time to figure out what was causing the stabbing pains in her neck, shoulders and all the way down to her arms.
They went away in the summers, she said, and they got better on weekends.
It became serious enough that the district sent in an occupational therapist to watch her work.
“He said, ‘You're twisting your head a thousand times a day,' ” Anderson said.
“You know, the issue of ergonomics is huge in lots of places. I've talked to several librarians who've had trouble with that. You think of librarian as being a nice, innocuous, safe thing to be. You're not thinking of work-related injuries.”
She studied the problem, discussed it with school officials and designed a footprint of her own work space.
Botchek had a nonsupportive beam removed from the library to improve sight lines. The tile floor under Anderson's work space was covered with carpet.
And Swinger got busy at the drafting board. It dawned on him and Edens that the Rattlesnake bleachers, destined for the scrap heap or another builder's lumber pile, might still be useful - and economical - to the school.
Swinger said such fir wood sells for something approaching $4 a board foot. He guessed Anderson's new desks required roughly 200 square board feet.
“It's a heck of a resource we came into,” Swinger said. “It doesn't take much to get us jacked, but it was like, ‘Oh, we want that wood. We love this. We don't care if there's gum stuck to the bottom, we'll take it.' ”
Same too with the slate, which has been piling up the past few years.
“We saved it because we thought it was pretty neat stuff,” he said. “It came in handy.”
The nails they used to assemble the cabinetry could fit in the palm of his hand, said Swinger. “If you look, you won't find any fasteners.”
Instead, all the frames are joined with simple mortise and tenon joints, a technique used for thousands of years to join two pieces of wood.
“We relied on good quality joinery and glue, not nails and staples,” Swinger said. “And there's not a bit of particleboard or fiberboard anywhere. It's all real stuff.”
Anderson and her husband built their own house, and she knows her way around a construction site. She said Swinger's choice of building materials “is the most wonderful thing he did with this.”
“I had laughingly said to him I was the recycling queen. Well, he's bested me,” she said.
She also applauded Swinger for the thought he put into the one nonrecycled aspect of the project - the countertops. He matched the library's color scheme of three shades of green with a marbleized laminate that picks up the light and dark greens and also the black slate.
“What you end up with,” said Botcheck, “is not only a neat project, recycling some existing material into a really unique process, but it allows a guy like Russ to show a little bit of his crafting ability. It gives him an opportunity to intermix some of his talent with just general day-to-day maintenance issues.”
And the kids at Chief Charlo?
“They're just blown away today,” Anderson said. “Wow: That's the word I've heard.”
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