Over the course of the past two and a half years, our living room has devolved from an intentional and composed space to a jumble of loose toys, broken crayons, and crumbs of all shapes and sizes. To even say that it is a room is a generous statement. These days it’s more like a perpetually sinking ship, with my wife and I desperately clinging to its masts.

It’s been a tough decline for our primary living space. When we first moved in, books tastefully lined the shelves. A large leather chair sat adjacent to the couch, with a coffee table placed between. We had coasters, a Verizon FiOS cable plan, and a large print frame of the Brooklyn Bridge.

We had wanted a nice rug, but realized this was a fools errand with a baby due in 3 weeks. So we opted for a washable one from Ruggable (use discount code MILLENNIALDAD for 10% off. Kidding.)

Nowadays, the adult books have been swapped for the Very Hungry Caterpillar and Good Luck Ice Cream Truck. The leather chair sits in the back of our garage, a location commonly known as furniture purgatory. The Verizon FiOS plan has been cancelled (it would be fiscally pathetic to spend $200 a month to watch 15 minutes of one Knicks game.) The print of the Brooklyn Bridge almost got knocked off the wall, replaced by Older Daughter’s prodigious output of artwork. The washable rug is still there, but it sits beneath House of Noa floor tiles.

In some houses if you get rid of the carpet, you find the original flooring underneath. Here, you’ll find the original baby proofing.

The coffee table, albeit repurposed, outlasted the rest of the adult items. It was a Wayfair purchase, assembled by me in those halcyon weeks right before Older Daughter was born. I’d spend those days half working, half scrambling to get everything out of moving boxes before Older Daughter came. At night we’d eat mostly takeout. Often on the Wayfair coffee table, as we did not yet have kids to model proper eating habits.

This particular piece of furniture has lived many lives. First, it served its intended functional utility. We’d place our coffee on it at 5:30 a.m. while rocking our newborn. As Older Daughter began to crawl, we realized it was a borderline dangerous obstacle and moved it to a less central location. Then, last October, as I was beginning my new job as a capitalistically worthless person helping to continue the human species, I set out to rearrange our living room; fully converting it in the playroom that it was inevitably destined to be.

Initially, the plan was to eliminate the coffee table and replace it with a Montessori style shelf. But we ordered the Montessori style shelf from the quality roulette wheel known as Amazon, and it had a piece missing. I went back and forth with the shell company behind the shell company who made the shelf, they were weird about it, so I ended up returning the shelf.

Instead we slapped some foam edge protectors all over the coffee table and voila. Montessori enough.

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This new playroom arrangement worked well for a few months. But then the law of parental anti-homeostasis kicked in. The law, known to all parents, states: Just when you think you have something figured out; a nap routine, bedtime, the arrangement of your house; your kids grow and evolve, and the protocols you painstakingly developed are no longer relevant.

As Younger Daughter nears walking, she has wreaked havoc all over our home in the form of physical curiosity. One of her favorite activities has been ripping the foam strips off the coffee table, eating them, and then crashing into the now-exposed corners and hard edges. Ultimately, this was an emergency room trip waiting to happen. Clearly it was time to say goodbye to our coffee table and order a new shelf.

This time we eschewed Amazon and went with Wayfair. An actual Montessori shelf was en route.

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Any parent of young children—particularly multiple young children—will tell you that when it comes to doing even the smallest home improvement tasks, they may or may not ever happen. Particularly if said task cannot be done during a nap, or requires the children to be out of the house for a decent stretch of time.

In this case, ordering the shelf was the easy part. Below is a timeline of what happened next:

March 18
After weeks of saying we should replace get a new shelf, a comment by a visiting family member re: the coffee table spurs me into action. I research shelves during a nap. I email my wife the one I think we should get. She concurs, and I order it.

March 20
The shelf arrives. Well, most of the shelf arrives. At checkout, Wayfair anxiety shamed me into getting anti-tip brackets. I was spending $120 on a shelf, so obviously I was going to pay another $25 for anti tip brackets.

Wayfair’s sunk-cost execution here was ruthless. In what world were anti-tip brackets not just included in the original shelf? But I respected it. This is how you need to do business in 2026 if you want to send your kids to summer camp, the prices of which I learned about a few months ago and still haven’t recovered.

March 21
The anti-tip brackets arrive. Hallelujah.

March 23
I unbox the shelf during the tail-end of one of my morning “deep work”" sessions. I know I won’t have enough time to assemble it, but I always like to get the lay of the land to see what I’m dealing with. I’ve found this to be a crucial component of Dad furniture assembling. Particularly these days, when the admin of my life is conducted in frantic 30 minute chunks.

I studied the wordless directions, ensured all the pieces were there, and then let the shelf invade my hippocampus during the next night’s sleep. I’m sure the science is completely wrong there, but you know what I mean.

March 24
After theoretically getting a night’s sleep, I eschew writing this newsletter in the morning to assemble the shelf. Spending the past few years Allen wrenching cribs, high chairs, desks, and dressers, I’m currently a doctoral student in furniture assembly.

The directions for this one requires careful attention—side X has 4 holes, side Y has 3, if you mess up then you have to take apart everything—but it is done relatively painlessly.

The one semi-significant plot twist is that I discover I wasted $25 on the anti-tip brackets. Standard anti-tip brackets were included after all. The extra ones were super-duper anti-tip brackets intended for areas that are prone to earthquakes and/or the Kool Aid Man. It’s unclear if they emphasized this at checkout, but I don’t have time to investigate.

The Next Few Days
The shelf sits in the basement. It’s ready for its debut, but our schedule is not. I need some time when both of the girls are not home to clear the existing coffee table, bring it down to the garage, bring up the new shelf, and secure it to the wall.

I assumed that while the new shelf sat in our basement, one of our daughters would inevitably fall on the exposed corners of the coffee table and need stitches. Thankfully, the bad fall/do they need stitches? plague passed over our house. It did however, land on one of our neighbors during this exact period of time. For some reason, I feel 15% responsible.

March 29
The big day. The girls were invited to a one year old birthday party at our friends and neighbors across the street. The plan was for my wife to take the girls when it started, I’d install the shelf, and then join the party when I was done. I figured I had about 30 minutes to accomplish the mission while still showing up to the party at a respectable time.

11:20: I clear the coffee table from the wall. Where it once stood, treasures of all sorts reveal themselves. A hair brush that was missing for weeks. Toys from a bygone era. Something from FedEx. And what I didn’t anticipate but obviously was going to be there, a moderately sized mountain of crumbs.

11:25: Vacuuming is typically not my domain (I can say this, I am more than domestic enough), but desperate times call for desperate measures. Vacuuming these crumbs is oddly satisfying, and I wish I had enough time to vacuum the entire room. But good enough will have to do.

11:30: I bring the dissembled coffee table down to the basement. The table is bulky and our basement stairs are narrow. This should really be done by two people.

One day, these semi-reckless maneuvers may catch up to me in the form of a serious injury. But for now I channel something that Alex Honnold said in Free Solo that has since stuck with me. When the stakes of injury (or in his case, death) are high, you tend to become so hyper focused on the task at hand that you have no other option to safely complete it, and it becomes arguably less dangerous than if your attention is otherwise even 2% occupied on something else.

11:35: Our garage is a disorganized mess that I cannot wait to one day clean up more aggressively than Rudy Guiliani cleaned up Times Square. It takes some searching, but I eventually find the drill and screwdrivers I need.

Due to pre-existing space technicality in the form of an electric fireplace, the anti-tip brackets don’t reach the wall. But they do reach the molding, so that’s where they go.

11:40: I’ve hit another roadblock in the form of a pre-existing bookshelf. The space (see below) is too narrow to fit my drill, so I must find the 1.5 inch screwdriver. After locating it, I realize this screwdriver also doesn’t really fit.

If I wasn’t racing against the clock, I probably would have panicked, or attempted to rearrange the entire thing by moving the modem that boxed in the shelf on the other side. But panicking was a luxury for a bygone era. I instead muster all the fine motor skills I’ve ever possessed and leverage the screw at a 45 degree angle so that it secures the anti-tip bracket. How I didn’t entirely strip the screw, I’ll never know. I forget the washer. Oh well.

11:45: I’m sweating at this point, so I change my shirt. I throw all the random toys into a bag and chuck it down the basement stairs, where they’ll be staged for a proper purge. I sweep up the loose drill bits and screws that pose an actual danger into my drill bag. These will be more properly organized later this afternoon in 3 three years.

11:48: I walk across the street and sneak into the party, blending into the background as the kids dance around during a musical performance.

I used to require, at minimum, half a dozen beers for this sort of thrill.