Saturday, September 03, 2011

For Want Of A Nail


For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

So what does this little proverb have to do with anything?
Well, last week, flush with my post-PMP exam success, I bought a spinner rack:

Why?  Because.

I had brought my car to the Sears auto center at the Dulles Town Center to get the alignment checked, which was the last thing that needed to be done as part of the accident repair, and which I hadn't had time to get done before I left for Michigan.
Having time to kill, I wandered around the Town Center and found myself in the Border's Express, which, going out of business, was selling everything, including their shelving.
For a very long time now I've wanted a spinner rack, owing to a sense of nerdy nostalgia.
As a kid, there were many stores I went into that had comics on spinner racks, racks adorned with signs that said, "Hey Kids!  Comics!" and featured images of comic book characters.
Given that the rack was only $40, I bought it on the spot.  (I'll make my own signs for it.)
Of course, I couldn't actually take it with me on the spot, so that had to wait until Thursday, at which point Scott met me at the Town Center and the two of us hauled it to my house.
So now I've got my spinner rack!  Yay!
Except, well, I'm not really sure where to put it.
When i moved into the house, I never really did a great job with the whole "a place for everything and everything in its place" thing.  In the nearly four years that have passed, things have only gotten worse.
Still, while I didn't have everything well-organized or arranged, the places where I dumped things in a jumbled mess seemed to make sense.
For example, I put my office in the bedroom next to the master bedroom.  I put the seldom-used guest bedroom in the bedroom in the rear corner because it has two windows which would allow, should the need arise, for a cross breeze.
The remaining, larger bedroom, then, became, in theory, the "library," where I housed all of my comics and the majority of my other books.  In time, however, that room became something of a dumping ground, becoming home to my tertiary computer (the secondary was already in there, as that's the computer upon which I keep my poorly-maintained comic book database), and to the "Closet of Forgotten Technology," the place where I keep old gadgets that, for whatever reason, I can't bring myself to dispose of completely.
Over time, the guest bedroom also became the workout room, and is now cluttered with last week's other purchase, a weight bench.
Now that I have the spinner rack, I'm realizing that I really need to do some purging and organizing, and some rearranging, as the arrangement of my disarray no longer makes as much sense as it once did. 
The problem is that I don't know where to start.
Maybe the library should be the bedroom, but then where does the library go? Into the workout room? Do I try to declutter the office to bring the library into that?  Should I try to find a way to use the largely wasted space in the living room, which, due to its long, thin shape is cluttered on one end and relatively open on the other?
I don't know where things should go, and I wonder if it wouldn't be better to just hold off until that semi-mythical "someday" when I finally get around to doing some full-on renovations in the house.
In other words, just as the absence of something as seemingly minor as a nail set off a chain of events that to a state of chaos and disarray, the presence of something as seemingly minor as a spinner rack has thrown the existing comfortable and familiar state of chaos and disarray into an uncomfortable and unfamiliar state of chaos and disarray.

1 comment:

Merlin T Wizard said...

Sounds like you need an interior design consultation or something.