Home Infrastructure

Lena's friend Emily recently decided to try a career in home organization. I think she's considering trying something else now, but she's definitely very very good at home organization. I suspect she'll be good at whatever she tries.

She came over recently to continue working on my apartment. Lately that has meant the she's been going through boxes and boxes of ancient papers, and creating a filing system for me. What a nightmare. But she's just so perky and nonjudgmental about it, that I can just about manage to be in the same room while she's working on it, without panicking the whole time.

I'm not typically a panic-ridden person. But I do have longstanding difficulties cleaning up my living area, that date back to childhood, issues with my mom, and so on. In the past few years, I've been making huge leaps and bounds with keeping the place cleaner, but not to the point where I can maintain my own living space without help.

So, I have a housekeeper named Erin who comes every week; and I hired Emily to help me figure out where everything really belongs. Interestingly enough, I found both Erin and Emily through Lena. Lena seems to be really helpful in lots of ways, now that I think about it. Finding hacker spaces, finding people to help with my home, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

So Emily was here recently, and there are several parts of the apartment that have really needed some attention for a long time. For one thing, my bed is a big oaken thing with drawers on either side, and a long storage space directly under the mattress, accessible from a little door at the foot of the bed. The problem with the long storage space is that anything that goes in there, doesn't have a convenient way to come out again. The stuff at the back, in particular, is really just in there. So I've kept the whole space empty, hollow, and wasted.

Another problem has been the towel rod in the bathroom. The two little metal catches are screwed into the wall just fine; but the actual rod-holders that attach to those catches, and the rods that go between the holders, had long since fallen off and been stowed away behind the toilet. So typically, I'd just drape the towels where I could; or lately they'd just lay on the floor till I needed them again. Yes, it's humiliating. I'm a travesty. Whatever.

The bathroom in general was just not well organized. There wasn't anyplace to put anything, but there were a lot of things that needed places to be. I tend to buy soap and shampoo and toilet paper in bulk; and they'd just sit under the sink, in a pile, gradually spreading out faster than I used them up.

So, this time around, Emily suggested that I commit to solving each of those problems before she returns this Saturday.

And I did! Well, two out of three. And the third is on the way!

First, I made a trip to Home Depot and The Container Store. I took josette with me for moral support and to help carry things. We got the special hex wrench that I needed in order to fasten the towel rack back where it was supposed to be. That's all it would have taken this whole time; but it took till now for me to actually go and buy the tool.

At The Container Store, we also picked up materials to build a shelf on the inside part of the bathroom door. Another brilliant Emily idea (ABEI)! All of a sudden, the room that was too small for shelves of any kind, would now have a nearly full-sized shelf. I got the Elfa system, which is so overpriced that the company executives should really be ashamed of themselves, or at least be punished in some sort of disincentivizing way.

So, the bathroom is now turbo-powered. I installed the shelf, and it's perfect - aside from the space it takes up. And the towel rack now proudly totes two towels, and looks like it's raring for more.

The storage space under the bed is another story, but I think I've got it figured. I'm going to sew a length of rope into a bed sheet, and place the bed sheet beneath any boxes I want to store down there. That way, when I want to get access to the boxes again, I just pull the rope, the bed sheet slides out, and the boxes slide out along with it. When I want to put the boxes away again, I just put a box on the sheet, and push it in, add the next box, push it in, and so on, and they drag the bed sheet with them all the way to the far end.

But I haven't done that yet.

So yeah. Towel rack. Door shelves. Emily. The apartment gradually progresses. Someone recently came over and said, "oooh, I like this place!" Check one item off the list of things I never thought would happen.