The washing machine arrived before I’d had time to drink my coffee this morning. Ava spent the rest of the morning shopping at Ikea while I went off to Home Depot. Then we worked. For hours. I am sore.

Two more Billy bookshelves will expand our bookshelf space downstairs. We had lined one long wall of our old apartment’s living room with bookshelves, but they were stuffed overfull, and the new living room is bigger so we needed to expand.

There’s a wide closet in the downstairs bedroom which came with hardware at either end for a dowel. Strange thing, though: wood, as a material, is less than perfectly rigid. When you stretch seven-plus feet of it across an unsupported space and then hang a lot of weight in the middle, it bends! Shocking, right? So I bought four angle-bracket things with a semicircle at the end, designed to solve this problem; and since they also solve the problem of supporting an overhead shelf, I decided to install one of those, too. And now the bedroom we are going to use as an office has better storage than either of the bedrooms we’ll use as actual bedrooms.

Speaking of which, we have two big chests of drawers which contained our clothes in adequate fashion but which had a bad habit of looming out into the room. Enter one 5×5 “Expedit”: raised up on little feet and bolted to the wall, it’s basically a not-exactly-built-in “builtin”, and while white melamine is not my favorite material it does brighten the room up.

What else? Oh, yeah, I installed hooks on the back of the bathroom door, and I fixed the bedroom light (two sockets, one of ’em wasn’t wired up properly).

Nine of the upstairs lights are LEDs now; only seven incandescents to go. Downstairs, I’ve only replaced two – there are still fourteen more incandescents wasting power and creating heat down there. Oh, well, I’ll get ’em all eventually.

Funny, it seemed like more work while I was doing it than it does now while I describe it.