When we remodeled our kitchen in 1999, the last thing to be finished was the kitchen desk and bookshelves. Somehow, when the plans were drawn, the bookshelves came down all the way to the surface of the desk, and when everything was installed, the desk was basically useless. The contractor quickly redid the bookshelves to leave the surface of the desk free, but it took months (and our withholding the final payment) for them to come back and finish the trim around the desk.
Bookshelves that go all the way to the ceiling seemed like a good idea, but the top shelf is awkward to get to, so all we’ve ever used it for is storing our supply of Sunset books (most of which we only looked at once or twice).
When we’ve found a new recipe we like during the lockdown, I’ve printed it and put it in a page protector; the stack of recipes has gotten fairly unwieldy (and slippery) over the last few weeks, and we wanted to organize them before doing our meal planning for this week. We’ve got plenty of spare 3-ring binders (thanks, IBM!), so I grabbed one and put the recipes in – but then I had to find a place to put the binder.
The bookshelves over the desk were the obvious place – but none of the shelves were tall enough to hold the binder. So I had to take everything off the top three shelves so I could move them around and make room for an 11-inch binder.
”¨But to do that, I had to clear off the desk so I’d have somewhere to put the contents of the shelves. And that got me to look at what I had on the desk – did I really need the itinerary and tickets from our 2014 trip to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh? Probably not.
Nor did we need a 1978 edition of “The Complete Medical Guide”, or a copy of Consumers’ Checkbook from Spring 2011, or….
When all was said and done, I had a lot more surface area visible on the desk; our accumulation of postage stamps was in one place instead of scattered; and I’d finally sorted the address labels that charities and companies have sent us over the years into “his”, “hers”, and “ours”.
Maybe I’ll do some photo editing tomorrow.
This reminds me of some of the den reorganizing we are going through now. First our guest bathroom had a water leak which flowed under drywall to soak some of the carpet in the den. This was our cue to remove the carpet and tile the den floor. But that required 2 desks, 3 file cabinets, and 6 bookcases to be removed. Of course everything needed to be emptied to make them light enough to be removed. Then we needed to sort through everything to decide what we really wanted to keep, what should be discarded, and what should be rehomed. The floor tile installation should be finished today. Then comes drywall repair, room repainting, and re-installation of desks, file cabinets, and bookcases. Then we get to do a final sort on things going back into that room. At least this happened while we weren’t traveling and is providing quite a diversion from a steady diet of reading and internet.