The tell-tale sign of my age this year wasn’t the number of candles on the cake (we went with a lone candle instead of using a whopping 31 candles this time around).  Nope, the true sign was in my birthday present request.  Scott loves me, so because I asked him to, he bought me metal shelves for my birthday.  I was (and am) truly thrilled. 

When we moved to our current house, we knew that our new home has tons and tons of extra space for us and our stuff.  So much space!  Despite all of that room for activities, we also soon discovered that the house is a tiny bit short on random-stuff-closet-space.  All of the normal stuff was fine, but there’s an issue of athletic equipment taking over a huge space on the floor and Christmas stuff stowed in the corner of a perfectly nice room.  There is also a bit of a book/magazine issue.  Not ideal.

To combat that sprawl, I bought a $15 plastic shelving unit right after we moved in.  The theory was that any storage would be better than no storage, and spending less money would be preferable to spending more money.  This is more or less what I bought:

Those weird green lines are there to illustrate how the product looks when actually assembled by yours truly.  I didn’t include a link to this product, because it got great reviews online.  I’m assuming it is a very different product from the one I bought and just happens to look the same.  So no, I’m not slandering this particular product–just shelves that fall apart with the touch of a finger.

While we were moving this unit from the laundry room to the garage (a whopping 20 feet or so), it fell apart twice.  Yep.  That’s how sturdy this is.  Anyway, I got to send it off to garage Siberia last night, and it was replaced by two different sizes of this:

Do you see how nice and parallel those bookcase legs are?  Oooh, aaah.  It’s like we gained a super useful closet in exactly the right spot.  True, I can barely reach the top shelf, but that makes it the perfect spot for our Christmas stuff. 

Yes, I’m getting older, and I absolutely love my birthday shelves.