Rant #3,688: All Together Now

After an extremely busy week--and just prior to another busy week--I worked intermittently all weekend to get my record albums out of boxes, alphabetized and on to my new record rack.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to IKEA, and we ordered the largest record rack that they had, which is known as the Kallax shelving system.

We finally had it put together, and it was put into our third bedroom, ready for me to tackle.

As you know, I have probably about 5,000 record albums, and just about all of them were in storage for about a year and a half, necessitated by the fact that the apartment that we moved to from our house simply wasn't large enough for me to have the LPs in this cramped apartment.

When the storage place we used raised our fee by $100 a month, we decided to take that money and use it for rent on a new, much larger apartment in the same community we were already in.

So all the LPs are now in the house, but there is one major problem; when we moved from the house, I was disabled with my leg injury, so all of the 5,000 LPs were haphazardly put into boxes and storage bins completely out of alphabetical order.

So as I opened each box to put the records on this Kallax rack, everything was a total mess. I had to realphabetize just about everything, from A--"Abbott and Costello" to, in this case M--"Men At Work", and let me tell you, this was a horror show of epic proportions.

Happily, swaths of records were in somewhat correct order, and before I got hurt, I did my own packing away of a few boxes, so some of it was in order ... somewhat.

But at least in this first segment of records, I found plenty of records out of order, so I had to devote time to sorting it all out, and I must have sorted through hundreds of LPs to get this thing straight, and the photo above shows the result of all my sweat.

Two notes: on the left, there appears to be an incomplete section, which is actually the end of the G section in the collection.

I appear to be missing several.LPs here, and I have yet to locate them, so I have left a space so I can fit them in when I find them.

If I don't find them, I will just move the several rows after it up in the system.

Right now, I could only get through "Men At Work" in the unit, and again, if I cannot locate the missing albums, I will just move everything up, and maybe I can get through "Roger Miller" if I can fit more albums in.

Of course ending at "Men At Work" begs the question: what am I going to do with the remainder of the collection?

Well, for right now, I am going to put what isn't on the rack in alphabetical order, and put it all aside until I get another rack, sooner better than later.

So for a good part of Sunday, after spending the better part of Saturday alphabetizing and putting up probably more than 2,000 LPs, I set out to take the boxes of records that haven't been done and alphabetize their contents.

I am putting them in the same tubs we used to store the LPs in storage, but there are just so many LPs to deal with ... and no, I have yet to find those missing albums.

So that is my job for the immediate future: to get the albums out of cardboard boxes and put them in the proper order, preparing them for the next unit--and also getting rid of as many cardboard boxes as possible into the trash, which pleases my wife to no end.

So in the middle if everything else I have to do during the next few weeks, I have to do this, but it will all lead to a nice setup.

"Men At Work" ... how appropriate for an end point, as I, myself, was certainly a "Man At Work" this weekend, and for the foreseeable future.