The painter was touching up trim even as the movers hauled in the furniture. I hope never to see that dance again.

Team Testosterone — beefy Marcel and his nephew Emmanuel — arrived at 1045 hr and immediately began imposing order on the chaos. The too-tall bookcases are now in the garage — and no, there isn’t room for them anywhere else in the house. A big, fancy, Victorian bookcase with glass doors lives on the ground floor, and an even bigger but more prosaic Victorian bookcase with no doors occupies most of one wall in the study upstairs. There’s also a half-height bookcase topped with a marble slab in the dining room. It has cookbooks in it.

The old bookcases, made of walnut and maple, are much stronger than modern ones made of veneered particle board. I keep art books, bound volumes of “Punch” from the Great War, atlases, a massive leather-bound family Bible, and other heavy, large-format volumes in the one with doors. The other one holds music and reference books, plus whatever history doesn’t fit elsewhere.

The storage area that takes up the half of the basement that isn’t the bunker is full of boxes ranging in size from 5-cu dish barrels (four of them!) to 1-cu book boxes. Stuff that came from Stratford in Rubbermaid bins is stashed on plywood shelving along the wall, and everything else is neatly stacked where I can get at it. The washing machine, dryer and freezer are all accessible — hooray!

Speaking of the bunker, eight large picture boxes are leaning against the wall where the bookcases were supposed to go. I haven’t even thought of unpacking them yet.

And the books — packed in six 2-cu boxes and three 1.5-cu boxes — are lined up along the railing that separates the dining room from the stairs down to the bunker. They’re safe and out of the gangway. Can’t say fairer than that.