Operation Get Organized

Rob and I have spent a good part of the last two weekends organizing our lives a bit better. The biggest project was clearing out the third bedroom in our condo which has been pretty much unusable since we moved in... packed full of boxes and utterly lacking in furniture. We have been meaning to turn it into a home office, and finally it's getting there.

Last Thursday we picked up a desk we'd ordered from Pier 1 and Saturday we bought some shelves from Ikea. Some of you may have seen these shelves in our previous homes... a set exactly like this now resides in Resa's home and another set like this, but lighter wood, left Philly with Valerie. Yet here we are with more. Couldn't beat the price and fit. Rob's become a pro at assembling them.


These shelves mean that our guest room closet floor is now free of books. Sadly, but perhaps fortunately, we seem to have lost all my law books somewhere between here and Philly via DC, so the bulk of our books fit on these shelves. We've probably given away 10 boxes of books in the past couple years -- always so painful to give away books. There's another two boxes of books to give away following this latest round of organization. But the Happy Hollisters and classic Nancy Drews are staying with us. :)

We still need a real desk chair, but Rob also assembled this lovely desk. Purchased in large part because it is "no tool assembly." Whoo hoo! Now my computer has a home besides our dining room table. Except I'm still at my dining room table right now. Hmmm. Anyway, you can see the rough draft from my 8th grade "obituary" sitting on the desk. Along with an awesome Chicago neighborhood map Resa gave to Rob a while back that we need to find a place for.

The next stop on our organization tour was our deck. We have this lovely outdoor rug made of recycled plastic, purchased in Saugatuck, but it kept getting blown away. Enter planters. We now are, in theory, growing heirloom tomatoes, parsley, two types of basil, dill, and something else I forget. Thanks to Target and Home Depot.

Last but not least was something for the downstairs. A lovely bar from World Market, a store we love. I've been eyeing this bar for a year and finally caved. We thought we might want to something that held more of our china, but in the end this was the right pick.

Now most of our bar ware, wine and liquor can be stored outside the kitchen. Note the Portuguese clay pitcher, the lovely decanter from Nick and Resa last Christmas, the champagne flutes and beer glasses from Lib and Colin, the bar tools from Hugh, and other stuff from other folks I'm sure I'm forgetting.

I know this is a much less interesting post than my adolescent plans for world domination, but I have to say, we're pretty darn psyched to be making use of all the space in our home. We feel like real adults or something.

The real good news is that work has been a lot less crazy since Resa and Nick's wedding. Rob and I have nearly had entire weekends to just take care of all the things we've been putting off. That's been quite a relief. :) It also meant that Friday night we got to hit the town for a fun concert with Resa, Nick and Jason. Saturday night we got to head out to the 'burbs for some extended family time and then have dinner with Al and Jen. And Sunday we got to have brunch with Bishop and Karen, and then enjoy chillin' and playing a random but really fun German puzzle game in which I achieved domination by starting up a lot of monasteries. Who knew.

And who knew weekends could provide so much free time.