Don't worry, I haven't become of those obsessive hoarding people. There's a good reason you can no longer see our counters due to the horrifying amount of stuff piled in heaps.
The heating and cooling people have come to live at our house, and I'm going to start calling one of them "Eldon" if they don't leave soon. It seems that the heating and cooling that was installed when we built the house wasn't quite adequate for our weird high ceilings and crazy floorplan.
Anyway, the system needed a bit of an "upgrade". I won't bore you with the details, but it involves installing two 12-inch diameter intake ducts that run from the basement to the very highest point in the house. This would have been fine in a normal house, but I maximized every square inch of this house. Whenever I saw the builders come at an empty space with a piece of drywall, I went running and demanded they turn into some sort of shelf or nook. That tactic? Super for storing our stuff, not so good when you need to hide ductwork.
After much soul searching we decided to lose part of the pantry. Not too much, but enough that we had to completely dismantle the entire shelving system and the contents of the pantry are now spread out all over the kitchen.
Somehow we've been cooking and functioning around the piles, but if this goes on much longer I might consider packing up and going back to Toronto.