the thing about living in the middle of a rehab project is that normal household tasks have this tendency to unfold into bigger and more complex projects than originally anticipated. russian nesting tasks. or, or…it’s more like our house is a clown car, stuffed with more problem clowns than you could have believed possible. you open up a closet and out come the problem clowns.

anyway. our bedroom closet still doesn’t have any shelves or clothing rods, meaning that on a good day, after cleaning up, it looks like this*:

while trying to find somewhere to put away the clean laundry, i decided to move all of our clothes that we don’t wear often (winter, fancy-dress) into the closet in the spare bedroom/office, which is the only closet that has a clothing rod. as i started hanging things on the rod it became immediately clear that it was too wide a span and that the rod would not bear the weight of everything i wanted to hang in there. it began to bow almost immediately:

so i stopped moving clothes. went to home depot. bought a bracket. located the studs. cut a piece of scrap lumber. installed a furring strip. installed the bracket. moved the original holders back by a 1/4″ to meet the 12″ standard because is anything ever installed right in this house? no. reinstalled the bracket, this time with the assistance of a level.**

2 hours later? clothes, neatly organized. it really is nice to live in an apartment where i can just fix things myself if they aren’t right, instead of waiting for a landlord to do it, or just putting up with it. but it’s a spectacular time suck.

* except without the drunk-goggles pano effect. the floorboards don’t really curve like that.

** to do the job right, i should have painted the furring strip before i put it in, and touched up all the paint afterward, but that’s okay because lau is going to come visit and we are going to paint closets suprising colors.