Everything is a roller coaster right now. We are supposed to be able to move into the basement apartment tomorrow afternoon. My spouse flies off at 6 am the next moring for very inportant meeting. I plan to stay and get us unpacked and make the apartment comfortable before he returns on Sunday.

It is a tall order. I have done this sort of thing before. I actually like to work when he is not around because home remodeling (or building) makes him nervous. He puts on a brave face and pitches in but I hate to see him have to. He does not make me watch the golf channel and I hate to make him watch our personal Home and Garden Channel.

One year when he was at the same meeting I ripped the house apart and leisurely put things back together. I redid his bathroom. Not a full remodel but repaired badly installed dry wall on one side of the room, changed out the medicine cabinet, re-grouted the tile, painted the room and replaced some of the accessories like the toilet paper holder and the towel rods. I brought in an oriental style rug and put a new bath mat down. I  put up photos and brought in a collection of reproduction Chinese import-ware vases. It was not a small change.

As a side bar, one of the vases I put in the bathroom turned out to be a $5000 piece that was several hundred years old. Thankfully I had it on a high, safe shelf. We enjoyed it then as did the hungry fire.

A few hours before he was to return home I tore his closet apart. He had run out of room in the smallish closet he had since he was teaching the University and going to meetings in suits but also had a regular everyday wardrobe. He is something of a clothes horse and I like helping him keep his clothes neatly organized for him.

Enter the closet organizer system. It was not expensive and things were purchased to take advantage of some old plastic rolling carts and other storage things I rustled up for his closet. Nonetheless, I had to move 3 feet further back in our under-eve closet than it was, build large shoe case, add a rack for double hanging, change our all of his hangers and put everything back. I knew I was rushing. I had spent too much time on his bathroom.

As I was thrashing around putting together shoe holders on top a a huge pile of his clothes he called and excitedly told me that his flight would be 30 minutes early and he was looking forward to being home. I nearly fell faint right in the middle of the clothes. There might have been 3 square feet of space in our bedroom that was not covered in clothes, cardboard boxes and tools.

Overdrive. I actually made it. I was not down stairs to greet him when he came in the door but I did manage to get the last shirt stuffed in the closet before he made it up the two flights of stairs from the garage to the bedroom.

We both enjoyed that closet. I liked it mostly because it helped him. I have to say that I liked it because the clothes looked pretty in it too.

I am hoping over these next few days that I can get us completely moved into this tiny basement apartment of ours, the cruise ship, so that when he returns home it will look like a penthouse cruise ship. I want it to feel luxurious.

We have had no space that was ours for so long it over-amplifies the import of being in a place that is ours. Perhaps it doesn’t. It is going to take a bit of time to figure out if it is the space or the stuff that has made thee past 20 months so unusual.