I know I’m generally decorating challenged, but the room across the hall from my office puts the rest of the house to shame in terms of decorating. It’s the room right off the front door, by the way.

We usually call it the classroom, but it has been called a living room, the empty room, the gym. . .

It has a huge bookshelf in the center of it. It originally had no lights. I first tried to light it with a tall standing lamp. Some child knocked that over and broke it. Then I tried a series of smaller lamps on the top of various transient furniture: a desk here, a retched shelf there. . .always temporary lighting, of course. I cringe when I think of how tacky the lamps I’d bought for my bedside looked down in the living room.

Finally, last year, I picked out some sconces and had them installed in the room, hooked up to the light switch. It’s the best lit room in the house.

When we first started homeschooling, I knew I needed shelving for all my books and equipment. I got the ugly plastic kind. The shelves reached toward the ceiling and was always on the verge of falling over. I eventually took the shelves apart and use them in the basement for storage.

After my mother died, I went furniture shopping at her house. She was a storage queen. I found this beautiful cabinet from my grandmother’s house. I grabbed that and put it in the classroom. It holds most of our games now. I also found this colorful metal cubby shelf system.

It looked like a giant lego stairway in blue, green, red, and yellow. It was sturdy, too. I had a hard time dismantling the shelf to put it in the car and bring home. And just as with real legos, I had a hard time putting it back together in the classroom. It was flimsy, leaning, awful, and temporary, of course. It’s been temporarily in the room for a few years now.

I dreamed of replacing it with a beautiful wooden cubby shelf, preferably matching the dark ebony game cabinet. I found one at amazon.

And we got it like Trading Spaces. We called our carpenter friend, Mark, who came over and put the shelf together today.

And we got to say bye bye to the giant lego shelf!