Another thing that working at home has made me notice is that our house is easily cluttered. Peter has two video game systems. The kids bring DVDs up from the basement and just leave them all around the television. (We have one TV. It’s kind of vintage. Big wooden casing — if that’s the right word — and around 30 years old.) I’m not totally innocent, because my knitting stuff sits out in the open, too.

I had a brainstorm a few weeks ago. What if we took the coats out of the coat closet, and installed shelves instead? After all, we have coat hooks by the back door. The infrequently used outerwear (like snowpants) could go in Moon’s closet. Brilliant.

So I went to Home Depot and bought a load of shelves and the hardware for them. Pete goodnaturedly agreed to put them up, and the kids settled in to watch. Because they know how entertaining our home improvement projects can be.

We didn’t disappoint. Several sweaty hours later, we were ready to slide in the shelves… and realized that (1) they weren’t secure and (2) they were too short. It was obvious we were going to need to do something different, so we took the whole thing back apart. And I closed the door so we wouldn’t have to look at all the drill holes we made trying to find the studs.

The next day, I had a truly good idea: a very nice man at church makes prayer benches out of recycled wood. Perhaps he would be able to cut shelves and supports for us out of some of that wood. We approached him the next Sunday, and not only did he agree to sell us the wood, he let us hire him to do the whole job. Wahoo! I had my shelves on Wednesday. I painted them Thursday. And I started organizing them Friday.

Whoa nelly, it does make a difference to have a place for our miscellaneous stuff. Peter did a big double take when he came home from school, because his games and controllers were out of sight. I think he was glad to figure out we didn’t just snap and decide to get rid of everything. Although maybe I shouldn’t have said anything — keep ‘em on their toes.