I have bigger aspirations for things than what my actual talents can provide. But that didn’t stop me – and Dev – from tackling a build-your-own-shelves project.

The first part was fairly easy. Buy the stuff. Sand the boards. Put the brackets together. Prime and spray paint them. Stain the boards. (Stinky!)

Then came the task of getting the shelves onto the wall.

My level confounds me. It has some laser thingy on it that seems fairly useless. But other people looked at me funny when I talked about this. So I’m thinking it must be me.

With the kid’s assistance, I managed to draw some straight lines. But what you don’t see pictured here (thankfully) was the painstaking, anxiety-causing process of getting the brackets into the wall. After I got over the melodrama I had to laugh. Of the six brackets, only the last two made it in without incident.

I broke one of my husband’s drill bits. Yes, I did.

And I stripped a couple of screws.

But, dang it, those shelves were up in time for Christmas (ahem, a bit late on my post, I know). The bottom-right bracket went in crooked, but we’re pretending it’s fine. If you ignore it, it might go away, right?