Rearranging the Deck Chairs

For months, boxes of stuff have been building up in the sun porch of the Admiralty. Building up and spilling out over the entry, the dining room, the living room.... It was getting kind of out of control.

In the next few months I need to get everything that is not yet ordered ordered (say that aloud five times). I need to have everything ready and easy to find, and I need to live with a little bit of sanity.

So today we made this:

I know you are asking, hey, isn't that just a disorganized sun porch full of boxes? But no, it is an organized sun porch full of boxes.

I made little lists for each room with the hardware and such that I need to have for them. Then as I located each item, I placed it in a stcak under the list, and checked it off. (You can see some of the lists taped to the wall above stacks of boxes, while others are taped to a box that holds everything for a room.)

I discovered that I ordered one door knob too few for the parlours, for example. And I had it brought home that there are a bunch of light fixtures I still need to order. Also, after the Great Elevator Door Debacle of 2017 -- in which the elevator company said, oh, no, we can't have the doors on opposite sides of the elevator open in different directions, we thought that was obvious, too bad you already hung the doors and installed the door hardware, chumps -- I am not entirely sure which of the handles for the addition rooms are at the house and which are in the boxes perched precariously on that elderly piece of computer equipment in the middle of the room. That's something I still need to figure out.

Anyway, it was a good exercise. I doled out all the window latches to the rooms they go with, put things in baggies marked with room names, made sure all the pieces of various lamps were here, labeled everything with the name of the room and location where it will be installed, and made myself a long list of things I need to order this week.

In the next two weeks I want to get everything stacked up in here and ready for when the contractor needs them. To that end I sat down and ordered a bunch of stuff that I had literally just left in open tabs on my browser (so many open tabs). I have more to order by phone tomorrow (to get my trade discount, yo). It's not an emergency yet, and I don't intend to let it become one.

posted by ayse on 04/09/17