holiday madness day one

this week, i have taken three days off work in order to get a crapload of stuff done before the holidays. mainly, our dining room needs to be "reclaimed" which means the stuff in there needs to move to the storage room which means the storage room needs emptying/organizing which means i am building bookcases in the living room. our living room is tiny, and our house is old and slightly wonky, so in addition to being less expensive that buying nice shelves, building them means they will fit properly. for example: the idea is to have shelves on either side of the window. but the window isn't exactly centred. it is kind-of-centrish, just centrist enough for you to think it should be symmetrical and for it to look stupid if the shelves are flush to the window on one side and there is a two-inch gap on the other. and then there is the levelness issue.

anyway i started today, day one, at home depot being disappointed by their stupid delivery costs and stupid rental truck (there is only one, first-come, first served, i.e. it is possible to buy a ton of lumber and find there is no truck to get it home with). so instead i headed to my neighbourhood hardware store/lumberyard, the oddly named new canadians, where a nice guy with cool glasses helped me with an endless selection of questions (do you have storm doors? magnetic paint? can you recommend a glass-cutter?)

delivery, however free and prompt, was not instantaneous, so i spent the rest of the morning & early afternoon doing christmas baking-type stuff: cooking the mincemeat, baking a cranberry loaf and chocolate-chip cookies with homemade candied orange peel, and trying to invent a recipe for strawberry bark.

so tg wasn't exactly thrilled when he came home to find a bunch of lumber in the hall and the living room a mess (i should have taken "before" pictures... sigh), but there has been productivity!