The Office Isn't Finished Yet...

But WE are...and I promise I won't post any more pictures....The top picture is OilMan's side. The bottom picture is my side. The black table under the window used to be against the wall with the shelves/boxes on top and the the desk they are now on used to be under the window. The amount of work involved in making this swap was unanticipated, as was the amount of dust on everything and the amount of damage to the wall behind boxes, until it was too late.

Putting the boxes back together was an exercise in spatial relationships. When we took them apart we just put them down anywhere. Some were still screwed together others were on their sides, upside down or backwards. I was stumped, but OilMan,  who has a puzzle on the go all the time (and a thousand boxes of finished ones in the garage) was a big help in reassembling it correctly. I think it would be fair to say that I never would have figured it out. Once the heavy lifting was done, he left me to replace everything on the shelves and taking the folding table back to the garage while he went out and put a new latch on the tool shed door....

It does look better, and I did get rid of a lot of stuff, but a lot of it just got shifted to another room. 
The tall black bookcase from IKEA in the corner was being stabilized and held up by the other bookcase. Now it is wobbling alarmingly, so it looks like I will have to take everything off of it in order to put the back on it....

I learned three things from this exercise:
1) Don't take apart IKEA furniture and expect to be able to put it together again. There will always be one or two pieces left over that are actually important, even if you can't figure out what to do with them. The wordless instructions don't help with this even if you remembered to save them.
2) Don't do it again
3) Don't even think of doing it again