One of our accomplishments for 2019 was to complete the next phase of our downsizing. In 2017 we sold our big house and moved into a nice urban apartment. In 2019 we had a small condo remodeled that I owned, and then moved into that. This involved initially making many decisions (cabinets, carpeting, fixtures) and then doing some work (painting), and then of course actually moving and arranging many things. So many things.
I decided recently that I was going to mentally declare this remodel-and-move-in phase done. From here on out, I decided, we weren't crossing off the last items on the remodel-and-move-in list; we were starting a new things-to-improve list. But there was one final thing I wanted to get done before I could do this.
Bear with me a sec while I explain the situation. A feature I like of our new place is what we call the "book nook." In the area that was originally designed to be a little dining room (emphasis on little) we put a wall of bookshelves:
As you can see, there's a corner bookcase. It turns out that a "corner bookcase," at least as conceived by IKEA, is not a bookcase that fits into a corner. It's a bookcase that's angled against the two bookcases to either side and held in place with some brackets. As a result, there's space behind the angled bookcase. The following schematic shows the arrangement, looking down from the top. The bookcases are outlined in blue, and the open space is shaded:
I didn't think much about this until one of the kids visited shortly after we moved in and asked "What if one of the cats gets trapped down there?"
I had never thought about this. The cats are not bookcase climbers, or they hadn't been in our earlier places. But who knows—maybe the move would make them anxious and they'd try to hide on top of the bookcases or something. The bookcases are 7 feet high, and if a cat wound up behind one, it would mean dismantling a good part of the book nook. Not to mention a seriously traumatized kitty.
That very evening I jury-rigged a pile of big books and notebooks to sort of cover the top of the open area. This looked sloppy and it detracted from that nice book-nook look.
So I decided that my last move-in project would be to deal with this, which I did on December 31. I used a piece of pegboard that I happened to have around. As you can see from the earlier schematic, there's nothing really to hold up the board on the wall. I ended up screwing an angle bracket into the wall in a way that the pegboard can rest on it. Here's the finished cover:
It's nothing you'd want to show in Architectural Digest, but I think it will work to prevent a cat from falling down behind the bookcase. And better yet, I can now declare that as of the last day of 2019, we were finished moving in.