Hello! Hope the beginning of your week is treating you well. We're still completely focused on making our new space livable, and although we're making some real progress, it's definitely a challenge. One of the reasons it's so challenging is that we are reconciling of years worth of our belongings that had been in storage, and that were suited for other homes and times.

The other is the nature of this new place. Though it feels spacious compared to our most recent digs (see the Home Tour page for more on that), it's still a pretty small place, and finding space for everything in a way that's clean, uncluttered, and not overwhelming requires a lot of thought.

Lou's room is the smallest of the rooms, and also, paradoxically, the one tasked with holding the most stuff. From the get-go, I planned to use her walls as much as possible, including for book storage. There were several ways to go about that, but I have always dug the rain gutter bookshelf thing - cute, cheap, and lots of storage for no floor foot print.

After what felt like an entire weekend wrestling with these things, they are up! And her books are out of boxes that were eating up precious floor space in the room. As Lou put it, not complaining, some of her dolls have bigger rooms than she does. We've been really trying to get her stuff together just so the room is usable (and because we think it's nice to settle in a kid as quickly as possible).

I'm not going to provide a tutorial here, because they abound on the internet, and because we sort of stumbled our way through it, so I don't think we're equipped to give advice. People tend to use vinyl gutters, but we went for aluminum, because that's what Home Depot had and we didn't really know any better. We used a hack saw to cut the 10 foot lengths down to the size we wanted (2 ft and 4 ft) and then a series of gutter braces, wall anchors and screws to attach them to the wall. Our walls are plaster, and I will keep you updated on how the shelves do up there.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the result. I wish I had painted them first - maybe a nice shiny black - but painting long strips of aluminum gutter in this insane apartment was not in the cards. As I say, we were really going for speed; getting her books a spot off the floor was an integral part of getting the whole room together....which is what I'm going to go continue doing right now. So hopefully we'll have some pics and some results really soon!

Thanks for stopping by.