Mixed Bag

Originally I was supposed to be away this weekend. When plans changed keeping me home, I kind of decided to not do anything and maybe relax a little.

So even though I knew it was supposed to rain/snow Saturday afternoon and I wouldn't have another chance until January, I didn't do the last bit of the leaves in the yard to finish up with them for the year.

But I didn't sit around and do nothing either.

Part of my responsibility in the whole nesting phenomenon is the preparation side. We have a room designated as "the nursery" but it's currently a bedroom with overflow from our closet and drawers. The first task for me is to make available closet space elsewhere, so the closet in "the nursery" can be utilized solely for baby stuff. Seems basic and off-topic from nursery nesting conversations, but I bet fathers everywhere have performed similar tasks prior to the execution of nesting - so follow along.

We have a "spare" room downstairs that we've used mostly for storage - storage of crap we could really just get rid of. In that room is a closet that we've used primarily as our IT closet. In there we had our computer, patch panel, printer, network storage, switches, cables, etc. The idea is to make that closet available as our overflow and rearrange the IT stuff to do so.

Rearranging the IT stuff meant moving most of it out of the closet and into our "work room" where we have these shelves that again we've poorly utilized since moving here. For the most part we just toss things up there and dig around for them later when we need it. That's a huge waste of space. So one of the very first tasks for me in preparing for "the nesting" is organizing these shelves.

Are you still following? We've gone from nursery closet, to spare closet, to work room shelves. See the path?

You can see in the photo I've started a little on the middle shelf on the left. I've been picking low hanging fruit so far and that section was easiest.

The next easiest piece was the toolbox area. In the middle of the shelves I had some toolboxes stacked. Some of which were empty, some of which belonged in other places, and some of which took up too much space. In the picture to the right you see my "roll-away" pieces. The top half has always sat on this little shelf I had made for it. The lower piece was sitting in the middle of the above mentioned shelves taking up too much space. Why I never added it to the collection on the toolbox shelf, I have no idea. Eh. That's not true. The reason it was never added was because the bottom shelf wasn't built to hold it. The legs didn't provide enough space for it to fit down there, so that was the next task.

A little measuring, some cutting, this should be quick and easy!

Not quite. First I didn't accommodate for the lock and label, so after cutting a bunch, making a lot of sawdust, and stuffing it in there, I had to pull it all out, measure and cut again.

Now it slid in past the lock, but I had another issue. I completely forgot that the legs on the other side needed cutting too for the box to completely fit on the shelf.

Doh!

Didn't matter. Jen had another task that needed attention.

Once the tree was up, we headed off to our friends house for the afternoon, so everything was left as it was.

Now back at it on Sunday, for some reason I decided to leave the toolbox as it was for now. I guess I decided the availability of the closet was more important and the empty shelf (from the big set of shelves) the toolbox made was enough to move out the computer equipment from the closet.

So I moved out the equipment and reorganized what had to stay in the closet so we could utilize the closet for it's original intention - hanging clothes.

It's not pretty, and I could have spent a lot more time on constructing a more sophisticated rack for the patch panel, but it's functional and I've got a lot more crap to get to. At least now we have a closet where we can hang clothes (once I put up the bar) that even has an available shelf for whatever else.

I still need to get back to that toolbox and the rest of the shelves in the basement. And now that I look at those pictures of my toolboxes precariously stacked on that rickety little wooden deal, I probably need to do something to strengthen and secure that thing so it doesn't come tumbling down when some little tyke decides it's a jungle gym.

- b