Sunday, April 18, 2010

New Home for my Music


This morning as on most Sunday mornings, our ward choir gathered at our house for weekly practice.  Instead of looking like the photo above, our living room looked like this:
Instead of a 2-drawer 48" lateral file cabinet we now have a 6 shelf 63" wide bookcase which has about 50% more storage space than all the other cabinets and cases where I've been keeping my music.  And it's all so much closer to the piano.

We got the new unit (actually 3 units standing side by side) at Scandinavian Designs, the same place where we purchased our computer room floor furniture.  To save $60 we picked up the "kits" rather than having them delivered.  With the 4 x 8 capacity of our van it was no trouble at all carrying the five packages home.  The wooden doors for the bottom unit are on backorder so technically the shelves are still a work in progress.

It got rather tricky unloading the heavy boxes even with the piano dolly and flatbed hand truck.  I'm not much of a lifter these days but between Carolyn and me we managed to move everything into our entry.

Carolyn would use the flat bed truck to sort of guide each box to the front door and inside while I placed the piano dolly under the back end and

pushed the whole package with my walker.  Little unconventional but it worked.  Carolyn and I had about enough energy to put together one of the units Friday evening.

Saturday morning Carolyn was attending a temple sealing and I had started opening the second package when Edward and his two older boys dropped in to help.

It turned out that these kits were designed so that I could actually use the help of Jake


Tim

and Edward.  They were all really helpful, too.  I don't know that I could have finished that morning without them.

When Carolyn returned, she, Edward, and I placed the cases next to each other, fastened them securely to the wall (we're earthquake conditioned, remember), and installed the glass doors on the left and right cases.

Now it was my turn again.  Box by box, and using my walker as a dolly, I hauled all the books I had in the far corner of the family room into the living room and sorted them as I placed them in their new home.  I was a little surprised that I don't have as much extra room as I had hoped.  Of course I still have three of 18 cells almost empty and two taken over by a new centerpiece - a clock we found at Big Lots!

4 comments:

  1. Looks beautiful and is much more appropriate for you music collection. Can't wait to see it in person.

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  2. Loved the part where you used your walker to push the package. Makes a great picture demonstrating independence even in less desirable circumstances.

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  3. I think people are always a little surprised at how I use my walker. For that matter they're surprised that I switch from my power chair to my walker and back again. But I believe in using the best tool for whatever job I'm doing - even pushing a heavy load.

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  4. Natalie, we can hardly wait for your visit as well. It seems like such a long time between visits to Southern California anymore.

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