the behemoth

We are here in our new home.

(If I didn't have such a heavy sense of responsibility, I would probably just post that sentence as-is without elaboration. It's such a weighty statement to me, after all. But here's the story behind it:)

We moved in over this past weekend, Memorial Day weekend. We transferred our belongings, our lives, and our cat about 6 miles across town to a new home, a house that we officially own and do not rent. We have nice neighbors. We have a lawn to mow and an attic with some sort of wild animal running around occasionally. We have our own driveway, and a laundry room that does not require mountains of quarters just to do one load of clothes. We share walls only with ourselves.

Whew.

Of course, the weekend was not without drama. I wish I could give you all some pictures to show, but I don't. I was working for a good part of the weekend, and I think our camera bag was probably buried underneath a pile of cardboard rubble early on, anyway. Plus, when you arms are tired and covered in cardboard paper cuts, breaking out the Canon isn't high on the list. If you need a visual, just think of an empty house, and then a whole bunch of jumbled furniture, brown boxes, and a yowling cat. There. That's what it looked like.

But I mentioned the drama. It came in the form of a bookcase.

When Jason and Company moved all of our stuff, we brought over my mom's stuff, too: she'll be living in our guest bedroom while she goes to nursing school full-time. And I have to say, I was pretty impressed at how she reduced a two-bedroom apartment's worth of stuff - a LOT of it - down to only what she could fit into a 12 x 12 room. What was left didn't look like a lot. It wasn't, really. But somewhere along the way, my mom mentioned a bookcase that she'd like to keep: she'd measured it out to make sure it fit the room, she said, and it fit so many of her books and other assorted things neatly that it would be a space-saver in the end. It's a huge behemoth creation of wood and particleboard that has been in the family as long as I have, has experienced several reincarnations involving paint and glaze, and has survived several moves completely intact.

She also mentioned that it might need to be moved in through the bedroom window. I am not a very handy person by nature, so I chose to wave this statement off, figuring that my very handy husband would know just what to do.

As it turned out, the bookcase does fit very nicely in her room. She wasn't kidding on that one. Where it didn't fit nicely was the narrow hallway leading down to her room, as well as the doorway going into the room. I wasn't actually present for the carnage, but somewhere along the way, the very wide bookcase got broken down, taken apart to fit into the room. Then there was the challenge of putting an unfamiliar piece of furniture back together. There were some negative thoughts and statements. There were threats of firewood-making. And four guys, completely fed up with the behemoth bookcase, stood around with pieces of it in their hands, all suggesting different ways to put it back together. My talkative brother talked. A lot. Craig the Handyman calmly suggested the best way to put the bookcase together, but I think all the confusion might have drowned him out, so he ended up holding a shelf for a while. Jason wanted to scrap the whole project and just buy a whole new bookcase, which just goes to show you he's lived entirely too long with me, One of Little Patience.

In the end, four different personalities came together in final harmony and got the bookcase together. Needless to say, I think compassion for my mother and the desire not to spend any more money won out over making the family relic into splinters, though this is likely the final, er, resting place for the bookcase.

I think my mom's graduation present will be a gift card to IKEA to start a new life with a new bookcase...