whoa-oh, domino.

I'm feeling a major domino effect in my house lately, where one project sets in motion a series of other projects. We started out by encapsulating the crawl space, which led to reorganizing the whole basement, which led to selling hundreds of dollars' worth of stuff from the basement, which led to buying new bookcases for the playroom, which led to painting the playroom, which led to reorganizing the playroom...and not one of those tasks - not one - is 100% complete right now. Also, the weather is breaking, which means I'm being seduced by sunshine and warm(er) air to just abandon all the half-finished indoor projects and work on outside projects instead. 

(Made J.J. rescue a wavy slide from a curbside trash pile last night so we can make this, oh yes I did.) (And spent yesterday afternoon at the thrift store, scouting out items for our outdoor music wall.)

But! I made good on my promise to finish building (and anchoring) the bookcases in the playroom:

Here are some shots of the other side of the room (the new gray paint is more evident in person - I think the sunlight is washing it out in these pictures):

I definitely want to add crown moulding to the bookcases, and to add a little trim to close the gap between the bookcases and the side walls. The gap is there because there's a return vent in one corner that one of the bookcases butts up against, so I mirrored it on other side of the room as well. But I finished building them! Even in spite of Ikea pulling an Ikea and giving me a wrong piece for the bookcase height extender:

That is most assuredly not a sixth screw-thingy.

For the time being, though, I'm leaving the bookcases alone and trying to focus on finding some storage bins (I just tossed all of Rowan's toys on the shelves for now), and figuring out where to position the rest of the furniture - namely, the third (and original) bookcase:

I think we're pretty set on keeping this brown EXPEDIT instead of replacing it with the new white one (which means the white one will go in the basement, in place of the Crumbling Workbench of Imminent Death), but I'm still not sure where to put it. It doesn't look perfect anywhere, and anytime I put it somewhere, a subset of dominoes starts to fall: I'm reminded that I also don't know where to hang any of the art now, and that the floor lamps don't have homes that make sense now, and why do I have so many pillows in this room, and where are we going to hang my guitars, and maybe I should paint the backs of the bookcases, and why don't my records fit on those shelves and where should I put them instead and...

Yeahhh.

And then there are the dominoes that I'm ignoring right now - the ones set off by the basement and playroom updates. Dominoes like the colors of the playroom blinds and the stairwell walls, which now clash with the gray of the playroom; and the halfhearted curtain system I sort of started across the crawl space opening; and the pile of stuff in the basement (and the garage, now that I think about it) that needs to move into our already-full outdoor shed...and...and...and...

I feel like there's a moral here somewhere. Downsize? Purge? Ignore? Probably. Or option D - all of the above, which shakes out as: ride out the domino train and see where it takes me. 

Which is probably back to Ikea for Moar Krap. Or outside to build a slide mound.