And the answer is...

For those of you who guessed ass-kicking bookshelf, YOU WERE RIGHT!!! Not only did he allow me to buy this beautiful beast (which cost more than our other two purchases put together), but he kicked me out of the room until he assembled it so that its final glory wouldn't be marred by seeing it in its various stages of undress.


It makes my extraordinarly heavy collection of books look positively trifling! I have room to buy ever so many more now! There's a rhyme and reason to which books are where, but it has more to do with how much I like them than it does with general logic. But if you can figure out which books I'd stab someone to keep (see: center tower) as opposed to which books I'm rather ashamed to own (see: entire top left shelf. see also: really bad but totally awesome fantasy), you'll have no problem navigating my new library.

We also bought this enormous, metal, infinitely practical monstrosity...

I totally love it. Look! I CAN SEE ALL MY SHOES! And yes, I know, only one of the shelves is forwards. I fixed them later. But look! My shoes! All of them (that's a lie. I have two pairs left in the closet, and three up by the front door, and my slippers are under the bed).

We also bought a coffee table, but there is a teeny massive dent in the top, so we're taking it back. We might have caused the dent. We don't think this is likely.

For lack of a measuring tape, we measured our spaces in Joels. This particular space, for example, is one Joel's wingspan minus one Joel's hand wide, and one Joel plus two Joel's hand span from thumb tip to pinky tall. I can't think of a more useful human being.