desperate times call for desperate measures

Make your bachelor pad look even more like a bachelor pad with this one weird trick!

This past weekend, I did a bit of rearranging. I'm running out of shelf/storage space in my studio, and I've been racking my brains in an effort to figure out how to find or make more space to stow my mortal possessions. I've had these Costco folding tables for a while, now,* and it occurred to me that, if I stacked one table on another, I'd have another table's worth of shelf space. This thought was great in theory, but in practice, I had to turn my studio into a three-dimensional game of Tetris as I figured out how to move bookshelves (and their contents) to find the best arrangement.**

Well, it ain't pretty, but above is the arrangement I came up with, and it's proof I don't have a girlfriend because no sane female would ever allow her man to turn their communal dwelling into something that looked like the above. This is pure, jury-rigged, male pragmatism on display—ugly but efficient. If I had the money, time, and energy, I might develop an alternative system involving head-height shelving around the interior perimeter of my apartment, but this is what I came up with on short notice. My dinner guests, two Saturdays from now, will have a nice chuckle when they see it. I expect my Korean buddy JW to talk loudly about how ugly my studio is.

But, hey—whatever works, right?

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*The tables used to play a role in the huge luncheons I would throw back when our team was in a far larger office in the Cheongshil Building down the street from where I am now. I think I kept three folding tables on site, and I'd deploy them every time we did a big luncheon. Once our team moved to a smaller space, I had no choice but to take my tables back to my studio (I'd bought the tables myself, after all), I've been using one of the folding tables as counter space for my kitchenette, and I've been storing the other two tables underneath a non-folding Costco table for the past couple of years. The non-folding table has become the top table in the stacked arrangement, as you see in the above photo.

**I seized the opportunity, after emptying my bookshelves, to put the books back on the shelves in a more-or-less organized manner. When I lived in Front Royal, Virginia, I had a massive library of books that I had arranged in a super-organized way that would have made Melvil Dewey proud. Moving back to Korea somehow broke me, though, and when I put my tiny ensemble of books onto my shelves here, I didn't bother to organize them at all.