This week has been a steady stream of unpacking boxes and not having room for anything. That’s not entirely true; it just feels like it. I know all these books fit on bookcases at the other end, so having piles all over the floor that didn’t go anywhere was leading me to tear my hair out and fight off panic attacks. HRH finally reminded me that we’ve given two bookcases up to the boy’s toys in the family room, and I remembered that my office closet was essentially all shelves that contained many, many binders and books and files, and so I’m not quite as strung out as I was before. I still have to figure out where it will all go, though. Missing two closets upstairs is really forcing me to get creative about how we store things. And on top of figuring out what books will go where, I’ve had to constantly rejig the moveable shelves in the cases to maximize the number of books going on and use the space as efficiently as possible, which has caused me to spend a lot of time looking at the stacks on the floor and back at the bookcases, doing a lot of work in my mind before I try to execute it in the physical world. HRH said last night that if we needed to buy more bookcases he was okay with that (we certainly have the room in the downstairs hallway), so I checked the online classifieds today and sent a couple of queries about used Ikea bookcases like the ones we’ve got. We also need one or two more CD racks, since about a quarter of our collection used to live in the DVD cabinet that is now downstairs.

The family room (or gaming room, as the moving team insisted on calling it) is shaping up very nicely. We found the buried box of VHS films that got Put Somewhere in the last move, so I can watch my VHS-only costume dramas any time I want again and the boy has a slew of new-to-him Disney films to discover. The kitchen was operative very quickly, except for the pot rack. Tonight HRH is painting the kitchen, and we’ll be able to hang the rack and put up the shelves. The living room has been emptied of the mountain of boxes right in the middle, as it was mostly books (okay, sure, I’ve got three lines of spine-up books across the front of the room instead, but at least it isn’t a mountain); the only boxes left have the CD player and audio receiver in them plus the satellite speakers.

My father in law brought over his small outdoor table and chairs for us to use in the gazebo thing we have out back, and HRH tightened all the bolts on the play structure so that it isn’t shaped like a rickety parallelogram any more and doesn’t sway when the boy uses it as a pirate ship.

The other thing that has been stressing me is the laundry system saga. I have been sharing my stress with Twitter but not here, so it’s only fair that you should hear about it, too.

Last week I told you about the whole preferred-pricing-certificate failure thing when HRH and his parents showed up at their appointment with the shop to buy the washer and dryer we’d researched and chosen. Not only did our certificate not apply to the laundry units because they were already priced as low as they’d go, they were out of stock for at least a month, despite the website claiming they’d ship the next day. This was an extra-huge kick in the pants because we’d passed up a fabulous weekend sale at Home Depot on Maytag Centennials in favour of the certificate, which ended up being worthless. So I’ve been spending a lot of time this week researching sales and models online (just as frustrating as trying to figure out how to get X books on [X – a bunch] shelves, but in a different way). Thursday morning I stopped at Corbeil because I’d seen an ad saying they would discount a value up to two times the equivalent sales taxes on a purchase till the end of August. They treated me exactly the way I wanted to be treated: they left me to stare at the machines in my price range and compare settings and cycles on my own, then let me approach them to ask for availability, extended warranties, and delivery. Four home runs: There was a basic set that was on sale for about three hundred dollars off its usual price; the protection plan was affordable; the set was in stock; and they’d deliver next day, free of charge. I looked wistfully at the Maytag set we’d passed up at Home Depot, but there’s no way we can afford a thousand dollar laundry set right now, not with a protection plan on top of it. The set we’ll get is by Inglis, a Canadian company (yay!) who made our fridge and is now manufactured by Whirlpool. We’ll go buy them tomorrow, because we’re really running into the must-wash-linens stage of after the move. I will be thankful to have the opportunity to wash things again.

My allergies acted up really badly the first two nights we were here. There is deep pile carpet on the stairs, and the previous owners had a cat. I think that perhaps they did not own a vacuum, too. HRH went to town on the stairs with the Shop-Vac, and we’ve been running the forced air on the fan setting for a couple of hours each night to clean the air in the house, which has helped immensely. The weather has been gorgeous, sunny and bright and breezy during the day and nice and cool at night. So cool, as a matter of fact, that HRH is making noises about pulling out the not-yet-unpacked boxes of heavy linens and using the feather duvet on our bed now instead of later this fall. Apparently we’re supposed to have another heatwave this coming week, though, so perhaps the feather duvet will remain in storage for now.

We’ve been enjoying the later start time in the morning. The boy’s preschool (and school, too) is a whole five minutes away, and since HRH didn’t have room to bring the bikes over last weekend we’ve been dropping the boy off then taking HRH to work, then running errands or whatnot before coming home and unpacking or working, then picking them up again at the end of the day. It’s been such an incredible relief to have the car again. I didn’t realise how restricted I felt, not having it to run errands when I needed to run them instead of waiting for the weekend when we tried to shoehorn as much in as possible. Now if only the boy’s internal clock would get the later-start-time memo. He’s been waking up between five and five-thirty.

I think that’s about it for now. I have a mostly-operational office as of early this afternoon. Now I just need to hang art and take the extra boxes of art and sewing supplies downstairs, but I’ll leave that for HRH. The books have just been shoved on shelves for now, but I can finesse them later.