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I should not be allowed to have power tools.

After weeks of putting it off, I finally opened the jigsaw and had a go at cutting some edges off these shelves.

(My tv is a couple of centimetres too big for this gap. I thought it would be better to make the gap bigger than to get a smaller TV.)

We already tried removing the shelves and they *will not* come off the wall. It's extremely weird. There's nothing visible on the shelves that looks like a mechanism for releasing whatever internal design has them floating there.

So the next plan: cut a few centimetres off the edge of each shelf.

I think they're made of particle board with a veneer applied to all the surfaces. Removing the veneer does not reveal any useful secrets.

I unpacked the jigsaw, carefully studied the instructions, measured & marked where I want to cut the shelves.

Made a little test cut on part of a shelf that I'm planning to discard. Seemed fine.

Put on the parallel-cut guide to make the first real cut and. Uh. Didn't tighten it properly. So the cut was too far in & I will have to repair it at some point.

Okay fine I don't care much about these shelves anyway. And I like the look of repaired damage, it adds charm. Like visible mending on clothes.

So. Parallel-cut guide properly tightened, I tried again.

Got about a third of the way in, and the saw started juddering. Like it had hit a different kind of material. Metal maybe?

I have a metal blade but it took me a while to think of trying it.

Meanwhile it's getting later in the day and probably not a good time for someone living in an apartment building to operate power tools.

Also, if something goes catastrophically wrong, I'm here on my own and have no-one to save me from my bad decisions.

Aaaaaaargh.

Will I put the TV back for now and resign myself to living with this awkwardness for weeks (possibly months) to come?

Yeah I will. Fuck it.

Wall-mounting this TV is now a problem for Future Chicken to solve.