fullygoldy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fullygoldy) wrote2007-08-28 08:11 am
fullygoldy) wrote2007-08-28 08:11 am
Getting Organized
This weekend, we got some good work done around the house, but not exactly what I’d planned to accomplish. The basement was refusing to dry out, and the cheapo bookshelves down there were waterlogged at the bottom to the point the uprights actually cracked and started to buckle. So, I boxed up all the books and stored them in the unfinished space (off the floor), in preparation for tearing out the soaked carpet. Yes, carpet and pad can be successfully dried in place, but only with serious tools and I didn’t feel like paying for those services – the carpet isn’t worth as much as the services would have cost. So the boy and I spent a good bit of Saturday hauling carpet out of the basement, and I got all but two loads of laundry washed in the meantime.
On Sunday, DH and I went by Menard’s to look at a potential CD storage rack. We’ve been dithering over what kind of rack to get for about a year now, and we’d agreed that we wanted to get something more like “real” furniture, and maybe even something that had doors on the front, to keep the look clean. But we just haven’t found anything we really love, and in the meantime, the CD situation was really getting on our nerves. I happened to see this shelving unit at Menard’s last week, and it was only $50, so I thought it would be worth it in the short term. It would fit between the window and the sofa, and we could get ALL the CDs and DVDs onto it. DH looked at it and agreed with me, so we picked it up before heading to the Monona Farmer’s Market for Farmer John’s gorgonzola, some lovely tomatoes and onions. Then we went to Woodman’s for the weekly groceries, and finally returned home. The girl had two friends over and they were painting T-shirts for the first day of school. Mavis was converting Rupert’s old pink Tee by adding the slogan, “I <3 my Senior Sister!” The girls were also making shirts for themselves, proclaiming their status as Seniors of 2008. We put away the groceries, had a snack and set to assembling the shelves.
Good old Sauder furniture – some assembly required, but not too tough, as long as you pay attention to getting the back completely flat while attaching it. We’ve got 4 shelves for CDs and 2 for DVDs now. If we crammed all the CDs in tight, we might have 2.5 shelves full, so there is room to grow. The top row is Rock, plus a grouping of Diana Krall, because I think she and Elvis Costello must sit next to each other. Second shelf is jazz/blues/swing. Third shelf is classical plus Christmas CDs. The next two shelves are for DVDs with boxed sets and series being on the top, and stand alones on the lower shelf. There are some VHS tapes mixed in, but only when they’re sets or part of a series. This actually gave us a list of things we want to update to DVD, which will free up about ¾ of a shelf. The very bottom shelf is CD sized again (the constraints of working with pre-drilled shelving), and is basically empty, except for my brilliant idea of storing our very small collection of audio books there.
In the process of loading all the CDs onto the shelves, we identified missing boxes, missing CDs and located a few CDs that we’ve never listened to. Two of them were definitely fromnayad , and one looks extremely experimental. I’m hoping that once we listen to it, we’ll recognize why we have it. We found a couple of CDs that need to be returned to lenders. We also put a small rack on the very top of the unit to hold the empty boxes of the CDs we’re carrying in the cars. Don’t we sound so organized?! We’ll see how long that system holds up. That little rack also disguises the stupid wall bracket used to attach the unit to the wall to prevent it tipping outward. I insisted DH do it, and as soon as he was done, I realized, 1) it was butt ugly, and 2) I was never going to be able to clean under or behind the thing without removing the dang bracket. ::sigh::
Now that we can see the entire collection at once, we’re hoping we’ll do more rotating of music. The old arrangement was such a bear to deal with that we’d settled for just listening to the same stuff for ages. It was organized, but the CDs were stored 3-deep on shelves that were low to the ground – very inconvenient for spontaneous music selection. One other thing I realized during this exercise – I can pretty much remember the circumstances for the acquisition of every CD in the collection just by looking at it. That’s a lotta info.
Good old Sauder furniture – some assembly required, but not too tough, as long as you pay attention to getting the back completely flat while attaching it. We’ve got 4 shelves for CDs and 2 for DVDs now. If we crammed all the CDs in tight, we might have 2.5 shelves full, so there is room to grow. The top row is Rock, plus a grouping of Diana Krall, because I think she and Elvis Costello must sit next to each other. Second shelf is jazz/blues/swing. Third shelf is classical plus Christmas CDs. The next two shelves are for DVDs with boxed sets and series being on the top, and stand alones on the lower shelf. There are some VHS tapes mixed in, but only when they’re sets or part of a series. This actually gave us a list of things we want to update to DVD, which will free up about ¾ of a shelf. The very bottom shelf is CD sized again (the constraints of working with pre-drilled shelving), and is basically empty, except for my brilliant idea of storing our very small collection of audio books there.
In the process of loading all the CDs onto the shelves, we identified missing boxes, missing CDs and located a few CDs that we’ve never listened to. Two of them were definitely from
nayad , and one looks extremely experimental. I’m hoping that once we listen to it, we’ll recognize why we have it. We found a couple of CDs that need to be returned to lenders. We also put a small rack on the very top of the unit to hold the empty boxes of the CDs we’re carrying in the cars. Don’t we sound so organized?! We’ll see how long that system holds up. That little rack also disguises the stupid wall bracket used to attach the unit to the wall to prevent it tipping outward. I insisted DH do it, and as soon as he was done, I realized, 1) it was butt ugly, and 2) I was never going to be able to clean under or behind the thing without removing the dang bracket. ::sigh:: Now that we can see the entire collection at once, we’re hoping we’ll do more rotating of music. The old arrangement was such a bear to deal with that we’d settled for just listening to the same stuff for ages. It was organized, but the CDs were stored 3-deep on shelves that were low to the ground – very inconvenient for spontaneous music selection. One other thing I realized during this exercise – I can pretty much remember the circumstances for the acquisition of every CD in the collection just by looking at it. That’s a lotta info.