A Productive Weekend - Part One

The story of last weekend is way too much of a saga to share in one post, so this week we'll share one part at a time until it's complete. 

Part One: The Closet

Part Two: The Christmas Tree

Part Three: The Curtains

Part Four: The Bed Assembly

Part Five: Anything Else I Remember Later to Add

Part Six: The Light Fixture

To provide some context, the weekend started on Thursday and ended on Sunday, included two wonderful Christmas celebrations, and less than ten total hours of sleep. We're getting too old for this. Adding this whole weekends events to the Murtaugh list. 

Part One: The Closet

You heard the beginning of the closet journey back here, when we purchased the necessary wire shelving supplies for the organization of our closet. We continued the project on Thursday. It started out going smoothly enough, we marked and measured all of the back clips, using some interesting leveling techniques. 

Using my Chevron Art as a straight edge for leveling.

We moved on to drilling the holes, which Philip liked a little bit too much.

My husband loves drilling way more than he should, I actually bribed him with it a bit before this, reminding him how much he loves it because he had forgotten. It was quickly remembered.

Back clips up, we moved on to the end clips, which are mounted on the side walls to hold up the shelves. This is where we started to run into trouble. It seemed there were studs there - and all of the closet mounting hardware comes with the drywall anchors attached and aren't really designed for studs. 

After trying unsuccessfully to pre-drill, hammer in a big nail, etc. etc. Philip cut off the ends of the end clip anchors so that they wouldn't flare out when the nail was hammered in, since they'd be impeded by the stud. We still couldn't get it to work, the nails were not catching to the stud. Stores were closed by this time, so we went to Philip's parents to see if they had any longer nails, but not too long! We took a couple back, and still no luck. We decided to give up for the night. 

Philip cutting off the anchors at the end of the end clips, very innovative thinking - that failed. 

Now for something a little bit mushy, one thing that made me really happy that night was that most of the time this kind of stress would make us not so happy with each other, but we were able to turn the night around and still feel loving and good about how the day went. 

Thursday came to an end.

Friday, Philip's parents came home and so we had Philip's dad come over to help us finish up the closet, hoping he'd have an idea that we didn't. 

While he went to get some screws from his house that he thought might work, Philip somehow managed to make everything he tried the day before which failed, somehow succeed. This is just one of those mysteries, I don't know what to tell you that we did differently, somehow what didn't work Thursday just worked perfectly Friday. 

Our closet was then hung. Philip went on to add the support arms, hang the shelves (an 8 foot shelf and a lower 4 foot shelf), and I was able to put some clothes in it! We still have to put up the doors and I definitely need to figure out how to organize all of our clothes still, but our evening had its first success on day 2. 

One shelf up! One to go. 

We went on to stay up until 5 AM working on some of the other parts that I've yet to tell you. Stay tuned! Anyone else installed wire shelving? Had a crazy weekend? Answer the poll tonight so tomorrow we can share our favourite Christmas foods with you, including some foods of our own creation that we're planning to make this year.