Wow!!!!!

I spent all weekend working on The Shrine.

First Katie and I made a trip to IKEA, where a very nice man was extremely helpful and spent a lot of time with us, even though he had throngs of hopeful people following him, hoping to snag him when we got done.  BTW, I bet that darn IKEA needs two  Brinks trucks every  night. I've never seen anything like it.

I had my eye on the Besta bookcases with the drawer inserts, but had no idea how many, or what layout to use.

So, I started out buying  only drawers, to see if this would be do-able, and to get an idea of how many bookcases I would need.

The drawers made up in a jiffy, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how much I could cram in a single drawer.

The next day, I patently bribed my "son-in-law" (hopefully soon to be the real thing), by offering to pay for dinner for him and the daughter child at a nice restaraunt if he'd help me put together bookcases. Not only did he agree, he even said he'd go to IKEA with me to pick them up. This is why I covet this man on a permanent basis.

I wish I'd had my camera to take a picture of him working. I would have posted it and titled it, "I pimped my daughter for this". But she had my camera in her bag.

By late afternoon, we'd gotten three of the bookcases assembled (no easy task in a room as crowded as The Shrine!), and drawer rails installed.    I sent them off to dinner, and kept working.

By evening, I had fifteen drawers packed and installed. What a difference!!!!! The room looks attractive, organized, and it's SOOOO easy to slide the drawers out and look at stuff. Ironically, it reminds me of the Teylers Museum in Leiden, Holland. An old Victorian mothpile, but one of the best museums I've ever been to. They have these wonderful  period display cabinets you can slide the drawers out and look at the fossils.  I believe now I understand where the whole premise of devils and imps came from, but that's another story for another day, unless you happen to be at the Teylers Museum, and then you'll inderstand. My hat is off to Mr. Teylers. He was a man with a true collectors' heart. He just had to have one of everything, and then another, and then one more.....

This morning I started arranging stuff on the chic glass display shelves.

I'm going to do some cleaning up of that side of the room, and then empty the sagging bookcases on the other side, and we'll build the new cases for that side,too.

This weekend, I'll hang the stained glass Moria window, and then decide whether or not to replace that gargantuan, ugl-eeee desk of mine with something crisp, cormfortable and modern, or whether the cheap, budget side of my brain will say, "No! The old one is serviceable!"

This is so exciting! I feel reinvigorated!!!!! Bring on The Hobbit!