House Organizing Week 2- Bookshelves

Man has this week been an interesting week. Wednesday night I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed and I could hear water running. I knew that there wasn't anything in the house that would be making the water run.  Our house is 50 years old so I rushed to get my hubby to help me check the basement to make sure nothing was leaking. As we were both downstairs we turn off the water to the whole house but we could still hear the running water but luckily there was nothing wrong in the house. T decided to check outside. To our dismay there was a broken pipe right next to our house in the front yard, and the water was starting to get close to the window wells. I called my dad to see what we should do and he told us to turn off the water at the meter.

The meter! Now where in the world is it. We still have 4 or 5 inches of snow on our lawn. It took us at least 15 minutes to find it. We grabbed shovels frantically digging through the snow trying to find it. After finding it we tried to turn it off, but our little T for turning our sprinkler system off was not cutting it. Taylor tried using pliers and anything else we thought might help to get the thing to turn. After not getting in to budge for 15 min we waited for my dad to get there and hoped he had his big sprinkler T with him. Unluckily he didn't so after both my dad and T trying to get it moved for another 10 minutes we called the city emergency water dept. After another 10 minutes a guy showed up and with one quick turn he had the water off. Man were we re leaved.

I guess I should mention that this all started around 11:30 p.m. and that we didn't get the water off until almost 1 a.m. Luckily no water got in the house. T and my dad recovered the sprinkler pipes that were the location of the break in hopes that the huge pool of water wouldn't freeze and would drain during the night so that we could figure out exactly where the break was. After my dad left it took us both quite a while to settle down before we could even think of going to bed.

The next morning my dad came back over and he and T found the break. Somehow one of the pipes that needed to be turned off when we drained the sprinkler system in the fall didn't get turned off. It's an understandable mistake because there are so many random things that need to be done to our sprinkler system to turn it off. To give you an idea. There are probably 4 different updates to the original system, and some of the knobs no longer work so you have to use pliers to turn them off. Oh well, at least we were only without water for less than 12 hours, and we won't have to worry about fixing the break until it's warmer outside and we go to turn the sprinklers on.

On that happy note this is the project I decided to tackle. Our book cases! I'm not quite done, but I'm not exactly sure what I want to do to make it look more decorated. Someday I hope to build bookshelves that look built in, and hide the brick wall.

Before: I had big binders sitting up top that I was always afraid would fall on my head when I tried to get one down. We also had a bunch of my great uncles books on the shelves. I took those books downstairs and put on the bookcases downstairs, and I'll deal with them later.

After: All of the large binders and textbooks are on the bottom helping so it doesn't look off balence. I also moved some of the shelves around to make room for some of the books.

If anyone has any ideas on how to make this wall look better please let me know!