Organizational Objectives

It is now Sunday evening, despite my brain's inability to accept that it has lost an hour.  My parents and their dogs have come and gone, Lena has finished her Dingo and is now staring at the front door expecting her friends to come charging back through it, and I am much much closer to having my house back into fighting shape.

You see, for the past few months, my second bedroom has been in a state of disarray.  I emptied the closet and set about a project of throwing out unnecessary items and repackaging the ones to be kept.  Due to the fact that I do not spend each and every weekend at my own house, this has been a slow moving process.

In anticipation of the possibility of having a weeknight house guest now that my father is starting his new job, I decided to kick things up a notch.  For YEARS I have lamented my lack of bookshelf space.  This weekend I solved that problem.

You see, I have a problem.  In the way that many women accumulate shoes, I accumulate books.  Yes, I know, it is strange that a person who has studied to become a librarian would not just borrow books for free from my local library.  My only excuse is that I wish to create my own personal library.

Unfortunately, I have never been able to keep up with enough shelf space to make this a reality.  Books get packed away in bins and forgotten.  Until I remember a specific book, decide that I must read it again NOW, and go digging through the catacombs.  Well, no more digging for me!

The event which truly made this possible was the removal of the double bed from my second bedroom to the farm.  This freed my second bedroom from the restriction of actually being a bedroom and allowed me the freedom to make of it what I wanted.  As I have not had a house guest in several years, it seemed ridiculous to maintain that much square footage of my home into such a useless purpose.

When I started to think about what I really need, I knew that I would eventually turn it into a reading room.  But where to begin?  Bookshelves, obviously.

Unfortunately, bookshelves do not come cheap.  At least not unless you are willing to look around for a bit.  I priced out the IKEA shelves, and figured that I could get what I wanted for $300 or less.  But IKEA is not near my house.

So I jumped on a few websites.  Menards had some promising prospects, so I hopped in my car yesterday to check out their supply.  If what I had found online was true, I could get away with three new shelves for under $100.  Unfortunately, the website lied.  The only shelves in stock were selling for at least $100 per unit.  I left empty-handed.

After a brief run-in at a few other places, I grudgingly turned to the hell mouth, AKA Walmart.  So yes, I realize that this makes me sound like a snob, but I avoid Walmart like the plague.  The disorder, the weird shoppers, the general sense of dirtiness.  I am definitely a Target girl.  But yesterday, Target was not an option.  Plus, Walmart is a mile from my house.

Luckily, I found what I needed quickly.  It was a bit cumbersome to load the three heavy boxes of shelves into my cart, but I was determined to get out of there as quickly as possible.  My three sets of shelves came to $89 total, which was a HECK of a deal.

I made it out with minimal damage despite bearing witness to a small child actively destroying a checkout line display while his parents bought two new large-screen television sets.  He had some sort of wooden stick and was running it over the shelves, knocking over displays of batteries and suckers.  Although I briefly considered telling him to knock it off, I rationalized that it was not my kid and not my concern.  One of the benefits of NOT being a parent.

I spent the greater part of yesterday evening putting together two of the shelves and got the last one up this morning.  Two shelves are almost completely filled, but there is still room on the third one even after I pulled in all of my previously stored books.  This is good as it means I have room to grow (translation:  buy more books).

To celebrate, I opened the shades in the room and then did the unthinkable:  I OPENED THE WINDOW.  To be clear, it was very nice outside today.  But also, I NEVER open windows.  In fact, I rarely open the shades.  To do both was symbolic of the sense of elation I felt in finally taking a step in a more organized direction.  Now if I could just get my closet sorted...