Can I Get a Do-Over?

Our house is a pit.  Why?  Because we have too much STUFF and no place to store it all.  But we're slowly chipping away at the masses and mounds and boxes and bogs I mean bags that are taking over our apartment.  We're actually doing quite well considering in the last two years we've moved from a 4-bedroom house to a 2-bedroom apartment halfway around the world, had a baby, and said baby has reached toddlerhood and all its toy-induced chaos.  For example, we've discovered Flylady and have been "flinging" things for months.  At the rate we're running I figure it'll only take another 10 years or so to find our closets.  Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that most of our STUFF is actually in storage in the States, so make that 20 years of flinging.  Oh well, it's good exercise.

Anyway, we decided that to at least organize our STUFF and get it off the floor where it's been for the last 2 years we ought to put up some shelves.  Enter the BX's single most affordable shelf.  I mean really, who on a military income can afford to shell out the $1000 marked on most of the furniture on base?  So yeah, $40 some-assembly-required BX special coming right up.

I am a capable woman.  I learned how to change a tire when I was 10 and the oil in the car around 12.  I can fix leaky pipes, build tv cabinets from scratch, and did backflips when we got a circular saw one year for Christmas.  I learned most of what I know from my mother, a mechanic/seamstress/jack-of-all-trades single mom - the kind that makes the world go 'round when nobody else feels like it or can't seem to get their acts together, and she does it all with a smile.  Amazing.  Bring on the philip's head and screws.

30 minutes and several trips to chase down missing hardware and tools that Little Bird decided to "help" carry all over the house later, this is what we ended up with:

Notice anything amiss?  How 'bout now:

Yeah.  Brilliant.  Guess we'll be doing this one again.