Move this; but first, this; and before that, this

So.

With the yarn shop closing, I need to make room for some furniture; antiques that my mother gave me. I knew upon getting them, in fact, wouldn’t have accepted them without Tim and I understanding that at some point in the future (for either good reasons or sad reasons) they would be in our house rather than the shop.

The biggest thing by far is the corner hutch (there’s also a table and a small… couch? Settee? I’m not sure what it’s called. Loveseat?). The hutch is built to go in a corner, and needs 2.5-3 feet on either side of the corner. It’s about 80″ tall. So Tim and I walked around the house, room by room, with a tape measure, evaluating each corner. There’s really only one corner it can go into both height-wise and without blocking anything, but that corner (in my office) was already taken up by two smaller hutches.

So we needed to move those two hutches in order to make room for the big corner hutch. Where could they go? Again; tape measure. My Libra orderliness wanted to keep them together – in the same room, at least, if not close to each other. Hey, they are 72″ long when next to each other. There’s a wall between our kitchen and living room that is exactly… 72″ long. So… guess what’s there now?

Oh! But guess what? There was something already on that wall (and exactly nobody is surprised). There were some bookshelves cobbled together from boards and L-brackets. CLASSY. So we would have to take those down and find someplace else for those books to go. Did I mention that the brown hutches there were already full of books? (Again, nobody is surprised).

I’d never liked the boards-and-brackets thing anyway (quick fix after The Training Husband (TM) got the nice shelves in the divorce). So Tim is going to build a fabulous bookshelf that will run the length of the long window in the living room. It will be adjustable for oddly sized books (what had been on the wall were art/humor/photography books, yes, I categorize my books, doesn’t *everyone* do that when they come from a family of writers and librarians?). It will be perfect. But it will take a couple of days to build.

Meanwhile, all of the books are on the floor, in front of the TV. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we just can’t watch anything on either DVD or VHS. Come to think of it, I’m not 100% sure that the VCR still works. Maybe it does. Ah well. MOVING ON.

It’s been like this for about 48 hours. In that 48 hours every worry that I ever had of becoming a hoarder and eventually being crushed to death by a falling pile of books or magazines has been banished. I have books piled on my desk. Books on the floor. I have to weave my way through piles of things that could fall over at any second… AND I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW STRESSFUL THAT IS. I may be ruthless with these books when I go to put them back on the shelves. I may wind up getting rid of a few/many/some. Too bad Denise and Tarrant don’t live here any more!

I also may need to cull my coffee-cup collection. Why, you ask? Because Tim’s also doing a little work on the room in which that collection is currently housed. You see, because of the closing of the yarn shop, I’ll be dyeing all the yarn we do at my house instead of at the shop. And our kitchen is in no way cut out to hold four crock pots that may need use at any moment, for most of the day, for most of the days of a given week.

So we have this dining room, that we never use as a dining room. Tim is ripping up the laminate that we put in back in… 2003 (?). Chili essentially destroyed it by peeing all over it, and Tim has wanted to replace it for a while. So this isn’t necessarily a hardship, it’s just now got a time limit on it that we weren’t expecting. Because he’s laying down tile, and is then going to build a brand-new dye bar, wherein I can dye yarns like a mofo, and the supplies for that will start moving into the house on June 28th. Hoo-boy; after a couple weeks, That Poor Man may get tired of me roaming around the house, Bat’leth in hand, chanting in a low voice “perhaps today… IS… a good day… to dye…”.

HAH! Thank you. I’ll be here all week.

ANYWAY. Up until 48 hours ago, the dining room mentioned above was a box room; all of those boxes are now in the corner of my office where those two hutches were, where the corner hutch will go in about a week. They are boxes mostly full of two wedding china sets and a lot of ceramics that I haven’t had room to put on display (see note about first husband getting shelves) for a number of years. My plan (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, plans) is that I will fit as many books onto the under-the-window bookshelf as I can, culling the herd as I go. Then onto the hutches, wherein I hope to be able to put the wedding china sets and as many of the ceramics as I can (culling the herd on those also; expect some things to maybe go up for sale).

Meanwhile, I’ll be tip-toeing around the house, trying not to knock anything over for the next two weeks. Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster. I said to Jenn earlier today, I didn’t know who I would rather not be over the next two weeks; myself, or Tim. I’m going to have a lot of emotions to process as we get into the last days of the physical yarn store. There’s going to be a lot of bittersweet moments and I hope I’m not too busy in the dye bar to get to appreciate them. I’m going to be hard at work, dyeing and winding yarn for the grand opening of our online shop a few days after the physical shop closes. I’m going to be on my feet 8-10 hours a day, overworking my shoulder on the winder, cranky and hurting by the time I get home. But Tim is still trying to catch up on his certification, still trying to work on getting a job, and now he’s taking on all this physical labor in the house that has a finite amount of time that he can spend on it until shit needs to be moved from the shop at the end of the month. Plus, he’ll have to deal with me. Who would you rather be?!