Dan and I are working on some house stuff this weekend! We spent pretty much all day Friday and most of Saturday running errands… We got doors for the shelf unit that is holding the overflow kitchen stuff, because it’s been driving me nuts with how cluttered it looks (since it’s a functional shelf, not a pretty shelf). We also got wall shelving for the office and bedroom (the kind with the metal tracks on the wall that make adjusting shelf height really simple), figured out which air filter we would like to get (and noticed that we have a 20% off coupon for it, thankfully), found a tower fan we like, found a container for wallets and keys, new and low flow toilets for the upstairs bathrooms, and other such things. We’ve been cleaning and organizing the house, which is why we knew some of what we needed.

My desk sold Friday morning, clearing up a decent amount of space in the office! With the extra space, we bought the shelves on Friday, and installed them in the office that night after dinner. The units go from one corner out three feet, and then from the same corner out for five feet (four foot shelf butted up against the one foot deep shelf from the other wall). They are three shelves high, meaning we now have a ton of shelf space in the office! After installing the shelves, we were able to move one desk into the corner with the shelves, which cleared up the wall between the window and closet. Then we were able to move the cat boxes from under the window to the wall between the window and closet, and we have a table that we are going to put over them to give us more useable space in there. Hopefully Dan’s desk will sell soon, because that will give us even more space! And now that we have the shelves (and some really cute bookends), the office can FINALLY get unpacked all the way (yes, it’s been over a year and a half, shhhhh)! We just haven’t had a place to put things until now.

The toilets that are currently upstairs are ancient, so they use a lot of water to flush. They might also have slight imperfections in the wax ring because sometimes I can smell sewer smells (though my nose is crazy sensitive and Dan can never seem to smell it)… they don’t leak, but it’ll be such a relief to have the new toilets in there! Not to mention, the new toilets all match (all three bathrooms will now have the same toilets) and don’t use anywhere near the amount of water that the old ones do! Yay for functional upstairs bathrooms!

Now, the doors for the shelf unit in the dining room… well, IKEA redesigned their Billy bookcases apparently. That would be all fine and dandy, except they don’t have any signage anywhere, and the doors for the new ones won’t fit the old shelves and they don’t sell doors for the old shelves. So what do we do? I really want the doors on the shelves, so I thought about it for quite a while. Then I realized that instead of returning them, we could drill our own holes. We put the hinges on the door, then Dan held the door in place while I used a white pastel pencil to mark the holes. After marking, Dan drilled holes where the screws needed to go, and we got the door hung! Now we just have to put up the second one.

After my break, I’m going to go start painting the shelves we’re going to hang in the kitchen. Maybe we’ll even have a chance to paint the kitchen before hanging them, but somehow I doubt it. We have the paint color picked out, but painting a room is a deceptively large amount of work, especially when you have to cover things that aren’t going to get moved… Oh well, the shelves should help it feel more homelike even without the paint on the walls. I’ll be sure to put up a picture of the shelves because I think they’re going to look really neat! 🙂

Things are happening around the house and it makes me really happy! I wish I had the energy to just keep going all day, like I used to be able to muster. The lack of energy and the orthostatic intolerance are probably the two hardest symptoms to get used to. Oh well, I just have to remember to pace myself, and it’ll all be okay! I think my Energizer batteries have finished charging now, so off I go!