I like to get stuff done. Most mornings, before my feet even hit the floor, I’ve composed a mental to-do list for that day. Mail the taxes, buy some milk, write a book review, bathe our dog, read to my daughter’s first-grade class, pick up a fifth of vodka. You get the picture.
Some days I even manage to check a decent number of tasks off my list. More often than not, however, too many unexpecteds—the puddle of cat vomit I step in when exiting my bed, a forgotten permission slip that has to be delivered to school, a phone call from a long-absent pal—prevent me from crossing anything off. And that bugs me.
But why? Who gives a rip if I don’t change the sheets or weed the flower bed? I can do it tomorrow. Or the next day.
Then again, maybe I need to get the rest of my family in on the act. No, I don’t want them carrying around silly, Sisyphean to-do lists in their heads. Instead, I need to delegate some of what’s on my list to them.
The first pass-along item came to me while wading through a sea of books, papers and clothes on the floor of my oldest daughter’s bedroom. Too many possessions, too little storage space, I thought. So I suggested she and her father visit Lowe’s to buy an assemble-it-yourself bookcase.
They took their assignment quite seriously, and quickly began calculating which belongings would call the new shelves home. They also measured where the bookcase would live, and decided on its height and the number of shelves it should have. Notebook in hand, they headed out.
A couple hours later they pulled back into our driveway. Instead of the expected large box, several pieces of lumber were sticking out the rear of our SUV.
“Nothing in stock satisfied our needs,” my husband explained. “So we’re going to build something ourselves.”
In addition to the wood, they’d purchased wood screws, primer and a quart of Pepto-Bismol pink paint. For their plans, they turned to Google Sketchup, a free application that allowed them to make a 3-D model of the final bookcase, with exact measurements for the required parts.
All right, I thought. We’ll be lugging the thing up the stairs by bedtime Sunday night.
But for weeks, Project Bookcase didn’t move past the planning stages. I had to step over the raw materials whenever I needed something from the storage shed on the fringe of our property. It was both a nuisance and a constant reminder of how little tolerance I have for started-and-abandoned projects.
But I kept my cool. O.K., there was the one time that I threatened to saw the wood into tiny pieces and feed them to our gerbils.
Then I decamped for a long weekend in Washington, D.C. The day after I got home, I opened the door to the storage shed, fully expecting to see a still-untouched pile of lumber. Shockingly, the lumber had morphed into a bookcase, freshly primed and drying atop a small plastic picnic table.
Well that’s interesting, I thought. In the ensuing days, dinner table conversations were peppered with reminiscences of a noisy electric saw, mixing up shelves and sides during assembly and plugging ill-drilled holes with wood putty.
On a rainy Saturday a few weeks later, my husband and both daughters disappeared. I went shopping. When I returned home and toted my purchases upstairs, I caught a whiff of something not entirely unpleasant—fresh paint.
I peaked into my daughter’s bedroom, and there is was: a three-shelf, Pepto-Bismol pink bookcase that fit beautifully between the desk and closet. It was perfect. And took only three months to complete.
