Super Transformation

In the continuing Saga of our home remodeling, we bring you the story of Cubby. Since we started working on my (super)office, we long thought that a bunch of little cubby shelves would be the best way to store all my junk stuff. Ikea's a bit expensive, and so is DI around here, so I made do with what we had. Then, last Saturday, we were going to go tag saling, but it was pouring. Nicole suggested I look on KSL an we found this for sale:

Perfect!

It was in SLC, about 40 miles away, but it seemed totally worth it. I cleaned out my wagon and headed up. The place actually had 4 of these for sale, but I just ended up getting two. They're really really solid 4'x4'x1'. After I paid for them we went to load them into the back of the wagon. Little problem: the wagon was too little! Necessity being the mother of invention and all, I said, "I do have this rack on top, I've never used it, but maybe we could strap them on?"

Another problem was that I didn't actually have any straps, but the nice people actually has some extra ties and let me use them. I'd never really used them before (they were the kind with a cinch to tighten them) but they seemed to work pretty well. I'm not expert, but I thought that they should have put some of those ties side-to-side and not just front to back. I decided to take side roads home from SLC (I used my new phone with "google maps" to avoid the highway).

A few miles down the road I saw a Wal-Mart. Remembering that we needed some travel umbrellas for Ireland (and thinking some extra rope would be handy), I pulled in. The very act of turning 90 degrees caused the stacked pile of shelving on my wagon roof to slide over two feet off the car! It didn't fall; I stuck out my arm to steady it, but could tell that that didn't help. I drove very slowly over to some empty parking stalls and very carefully got out of the car. Miraculously, the shelves never fell off. I recentered them, bought the rope (and the umbrellas, they're forecasting rain in Ireland this Friday) and lashed them up pretty good. While a plastic clothes line and a nylon multipurpose rope probably weren't the best selections, they were all I could find and seemed to get the job done. It was an extremely tense, hour+ drive (at 20 miles per hour) back to Provo, but I made it. We got right to work painting them. The thing about cubbies is it's a lot of surface area. I calculate about 136 square feet (we didn't paint the tops of each cubby) so it was still a lot of paint (I still have some silver on my hand two days latter).

And now, presenting the cubbies alter-egos, Super-Cubbies! Not a bad transformation and we've already started filling the 40 cubbies...