Handymen

Whoa boy, it’s D A R K when I wake up now – and it’s going to get darker yet! There’s something really cruel about waking up at the crack of dawn, having to flip on the lights, and temporarily blind yourself. I’ve been thinking I need to invest in the timer lamp that slowly increases the light in a room until a specified time. It’s more like natural sunrise and that way when you wake up you aren’t in total darkness. Anyone ever heard of those? Tried them?

With the constant rain on Saturday and Sunday, it was wonderful that we could move the moving date back a week. Hopefully next Saturday will be better! In the meantime, Ben and I loaded up our cars and made a few trips back and forth Friday night. Here’s load 1 of 4:

 

Of course, picking things up and dumping them in the middle of the garage is the easy part – the harder stuff comes when we try and figure out where it all should go!

With the rain pounding down on Saturday, we decided that would be a good day to start organizing all the stuff we had brought over. I cringed a bit because it’s hard to organize piles of boxes without going through everything – and we don’t have the time for that right now.

But first things first, I had seriously been craving the carrot cake pancakes at ihop, so we went there for a quick breakfast.

Eggs, hashbrowns, bacon and sausage…

Ben ordered the carrot cake, I ordered the pumpkin and we cut them in half to share. The carrot cake pancakes were amazing (but part of me wonders if that’s because it was drizzled in cream cheese icing??). They were filled with carrots, coconut, raisins, and nuts. They didn’t need the butter on top so that was scooted to the side. I love pumpkin pancakes but these were a little dry compared to the carrot cake. I’m thinking I need to make pumpkin pancakes at home some morning!

After heading back to analyze the mountain of boxes, my co-worker called to see what we were up to. I half-jokingly said we were looking at making some shelving for the basement to help organize – and they offered to help!

I should mention that while my parents are very handy (they’ve completely renovated 2 houses and flipped another one), none of that has rubbed off on me. Ben’s maybe less handy than I am so between the two of us, we’re borderline useless. 🙂 How amazing was it that we had helpers with all the tools and the knowledge to help!

We measured and re-measured and were off to the store for lumber.

Our helpers hadn’t eaten yet, so we stopped at Culvers so they could get some burgers. In the meantime, I indulged in one of my favorite ice cream flavors of all time: caramel cashew. Heaven in a cup!

We made 5 rectangular braces to hold the shelves in place. The plan was for one 6′ shelf and another 12′ shelf.

We have some tubing in the middle of the wall so we measured 5′ high so we’d come up right under with room for some smaller boxes on the top shelf.

Each shelf was free-standing except for one of the braces which we made taller and bolted into the support beams in the ceiling. That would help eliminate any wiggling and moving of the shelf.

Ta-da! The smaller 6′ shelf is complete! You can see the 2×4 that we screwed underneath the white shelf to give some added support and strength.

The bottom shelves have our scrap wood pieces underneath to support. It’s always a good idea to keep any long-term storage up off the ground a little bit. This helps for moisture control, among other things.

After completing the shelves it was time for dinner. We ordered pizza and all watched the final episodes of Walking Dead season 2. They’ve got us hooked now. 🙂

I can’t tell you how excited I am to have all this shelf space. For now we can just label boxes and store them on here out of the way until we have time to properly sort through everything and re-package/store.

Last night I was up way too late flipping channels between the Packer game and the Cardinals game. Both of my teams won – hurray!