We knew going into this that the moving expenses wouldn’t end with the moving company and the setup of utilities. There’s also replacing outdated cooking gear, like the should-have-replaced-it-years-ago griddle, and adding shelving which would never have fit into the apartment, hence living partly out of boxes for most of the 8 years of that residency.

This week I ordered in new shelves for the erstwhile pantry space. (Basically, the “pantry space” is the walkway from the garage door & back door, past the kitchen, into the house proper.) This will allow us to, you guessed it, unbox more stuff.

Today we assembled the shelves. Okay, Vyx helped with the first one. I did the second unit solo.

I’m not wild about this construction style, but it beats the wireframe style, even though they both essentially come down to “beat this shelving mount into place with a rubber mallet until it stays put,” which is… certainly a thing, isn’t it. At any rate, soon these shelves will be covered in foodstuffs, cookware, and the board game library. (It’s well away from the cooking area, don’t worry.)

More and more, we’re making this our home. And I’m still loving it.

Some people use letters or numbers, others use colored stickers (we in fact did that for the boxes), but for keeping track of which shelves and which sets of shelving pegs belong with what bookshelf, Vyx broke out the washi tape. During the preparation for moving day, she used one roll of washi tape for each individual bookshelf, then stuck a strip of tape from that specific roll onto:

• The bookshelf unit
• Each shelf from that unit
• The bag containing the shelving pegs taken from that unit

You might wonder why she went to all that trouble, but not all of our shelves were purchased from the same store or during the same timeframe. Even from year to year, Ikea’s bookshelf line can change somewhat. (Sometimes.) And not all of our shelves came from Ikea. (Most, yes, but not all.) All of this means that “just grab a couple of the black shelves” won’t guarantee that they’re the right fit for a given unit. Best to keep ’em organized.

Which wouldn’t be a problem but we have a lot of dingdanged bookshelves (and bookshelf-adjacent units, like my CD/DVD shelves). There are eight in the office alone, plus several more in Vyx’s bedroom, plus at least four in the living room. I might even be forgetting one or two somewhere.

During my lunch break I wanted to get one more of the office bookshelves squared away, so I looked at the washi tape stuck under the top of the shelf unit so I’d know what to go grab from the supplies stacked downstairs… then realized I probably wouldn’t remember by the time I got down to those stacked supplies from the office upstairs. So I did the purely logical thing:

I peeled the tape off of the shelf unit itself and stuck it to the back of my hand as a… well, handy reference while I looked for the correct shelves and pegs. Simple, practical, and since washi tape comes off very easily it wasn’t even painful.

And now, yet another shelf awaits its allotment of reading material.

We have so much yet to do, but progress is progress nonetheless.