I never really have moved in since we came to the house. My lighting hasn’t worked, never did get my pirate hat hung up, I’m using a child’s coathanging rig on the back of my door to hang adult clothing (it drags on the carpet) and the walls have gotten dusty, of all things. Plus I am so jealous of Jane being able to put her chair where she can directly look out the window at the pond.
I mentioned this, and Jane, out of the goodness of her heart, and the fact I described my room as a Rubik’s cube…Jane has a unique gift for looking at pieces and fitting them into a box. Which kinda describes my room. So she came in, stared at it a while, noted the abundant dust and got: 2 swiffers, the vacuum, drill bits, drill, screwdrivers, and various bits and bobs. We started moving fragiles, (many) then the furniture. I ditched one piece of my furniture, and another, and then we started moving the heavy stuff, like the platform bed. We vacuumed. We picked up stuff. We moved stuff. We dusted everything. I went out and got the clippers for two branches of the flowering quince that blocked my view of the pond, and voila! view!
It actually looks like a room, not a dumping ground. Jane worked herself near sick on it, and I helped, but not as much as she did. She put up my nautical pictures, she helped me hang the pirate hat where it belongs, and we cleaned out my closet and got the door put back on…I tell you it has been sad, my premises. But I always said, someday, and Jane just declared this was some day.
I never would have thought of where the furniture ended up, and what we need now are two little end tables from Walmart that will help me control the paper monster. One of the two wicker drawer dressers is directly in front of my new workstation (read: favorite comfy chair facing the pond); and I am clearing drawers to use for office things. Plus I can scoot the laptop under the dresser to protect it when not in use.
Ah, I’m not the least bit sick. My body just sometimes goes into shutdown when I’ve been running on adrenaline and finally sit. That makes me chill. I had a blast. It was fun working with you, and the room looks so nice now!
BTW…we raised the kid’s “coathanging rig” on the back of the door to adult height, and it’s amazingly solid. Then Carolyn had this totally great idea. She’s got a nautical/piratical theme going in her room and had some little porthole-framed pictures that had been just lying around gathering dust. She got the great idea to put them on the door, so there’s one with a picture of a ship that is on the outside of the door and one with a lighthouse on the inside. FUN!
Oh…and lights always work better when they’re plugged in. 😀 😉
My, such virtue! I’m not going to try to compete with this so am keeping the door on the middle bedroom firmly shut. What I can’t see I won’t worry about.
Oh, and there’s a new database on ancestry; England & Wales Criminal Registers, 1791-1892. More of my folks are showing up there prior to being transported.
Rats! Sounds like a great one, and since I’ve been patching the tree since the crash, I haven’t been keying. Rats, rats, rats!
I can’t wait to see it!
Oh – you do that too? Leave stuff around and then suddenly blitz it?
Once it’s blitzed I can never figure out why I didn’t do it ages ago, but have come to the happy accommodation with myself that when it’s done it’s done – and if it’s not, it’s not!
LOL! My ‘office’ room tends to gradually accumulate “stuff” until one day I can’t stand it any more, and then I go into a controlled frenzy, involving bin-liners full of sedimentary layers removed and some fossilzed gems rediscovered.
You’re really lucky to have someone like Jane around – that skill to be able to look at a space and what’s in it, and then redistribute it in 3D all in her mind is rare. I should hang onto her if I were you! 😉
😆 Back a decade ago I’d pack a suitcase, and Jane would take a look at it, shake her head, and start ‘flinging’, as I called it. Pretty soon she’d have taken everything out, put it back (she can fold and I’m lousy at it) and have 1/3 more space in the suitcase. It’s amazing. She figured how to pack the car so we can travel with the cats. She heads at the garage and four hours later every box in it is rearranged, half of it put aloft and the rest neatly organized.
It’s so nice to have someone with space skills in the household. My husband can do things like that; when he was on the rock and roll road in the 70s he was in charge of packing equipment in a Chevy van that allowed the band guys to sit on bits of it. Kustom speakers came with padding on the frames; great for such uses. Unfortunately for me, he has used up all the wall space available for bookshelves in our house, so I have to get rid of some – that’s hard.
Usable space for current needs is a wonderful thing; congratulations.
Have been reading up on the past few days. What a saga. If it weren’t for the very serious nature of the whole thing it could almost be an SNL sketch (Anthony Hopkins guest hosting?) Cleaning and redesigning your work/living space must be a welcome relief. I find that when I am under a lot of stress deep gritty cleaning helps, no real brain power involved, the old hind brain gets to work seeing in a different light AND you get a clean space to boot!
Speaking of light that is one of the wonderful things about your books: They let me see by a different light.
Really, REALLY glad that Mr. Lector has been found.
Yep. He hitched a ride across country, got out and was ready to hitch another when somebody reported him and the patrol or one of the sheriff’s deputies found him hiding in a wooded spot…
I’ll bet the guy who gave him a ride to that spot is now reassessing his decision to pick up hitchhikers.
I have to get things moved around before October 13, because after that date, I’m not going to be moving much of anything for several weeks. I need a wide passageway between the bedroom and the bathroom, and maybe some way to get the electronics in the living room to work from the bedroom. I’m not going to move any of those, just do what I can to keep my moving from room to room at a minimum until the knee is healed.
Knee surgery, Joe? Hope it goes well!
We use some remote switches I bet you can get at Lowes. One of ours is a 3-button remote that can control up to 3 plugin units you put in the socket, plug, say, a lamp into each, and one specific button of that remote will turn one specific lamp
on and off if the lamp is set to ‘on.’
We use them for all sorts of lights that are inconvenient to reach. We can sit in the living room and control any light in the room.
When my dog was on enforced cage rest (she has a bulging disk in her neck that we were trying to get stabilized), I moved all the electronics into the bedroom. I fenced off a small space by the bed for the dog to stay in, but she gets nervous and anxious and will start pacing if I crate her and leave her, so I was looking at 6 weeks of living in the bedroom with her. If you have satellite or cable tv, you can run a really long cable from the outlet where the cable comes out the wall to the TV set, and then just move the set to the new room. (I freely admit to being probably the last person on earth who doesn’t already have the bedroom wired for TV.) The computer went onto the dresser for easy access. Phone was already in the bedroom. Now, if you need to get microwave in there too, that might get a bit crowded.
I don’t have a TV in my bedroom. Since I am an insomniac, a TV would be a major distraction.
I don’t have a TV at all, but I’m lusting after a Wii like my grandson’s, so now I need to figure out a place to put it. I’m thinking of a rolling cart so I can keep it in a closet when not in use. Worried though that it will get into the closet and be forgotten instead of inspiring a more active lifestyle!
Congratulations on at least partly taming the monster, and massive kudos to Jane for her part! Take a look at yard sales and secondhand shops for your end tables; I’ve scored a couple from Goodwill that are still in use, and found one on the side of the road!
We have several pre-assembled ship models that are undergoing some massive sea changes 😀 They were purchased cheaply because they had minor breakage; we are ‘waterlining’ them and putting the sails into harbor stow. This lets them both be used for our RPGs and look really good as display models, especially when all the little officer and crew figures are on board her.
We so want to do these models. They’re the sort that has individual planks, which ‘nail’ (tiny brads) to the frame, etc. And then you get to do the rigging and all the knots. They have miniature fittings of all sorts, some so tiny I think it’s more like threading a needle. These things can get incredibly fussy—I love it. I first saw one of these kits in a window in Cremona, Italy, and there was no way on earth I could get that safely back to the states, even in kit form—not to mention I was a poor first-year teacher with very, very limited funds. Then…heh…the internet happened. And I thought about that one day, and lo! they can be had.
The next thing we need is the time and clear space.
Thank you. Not just knee surgery, total replacement of the right knee, so I can have matching scars on both knees. This will be the third replacement surgery I’ll have, the first on this knee.
Where did I see the models, I almost fell off the couch when I saw the prices, but, I guess if you want exact models, you pay for exact models.
I hope it goes really well, Joe!
Re the ship models, the only positive thing you can say about those prices is that they cover a lot of entertainment, because you don’t build one of these in a weekend, or even half a year, unless you’re really at it a lot. We got ours as a major Christmas present for both of us one year. Of course, the really, really dedicated people buy the planking and cut their own models. I’ve seen a one or two of those recent not-from-kit models (as of course all model ships used to be) that are amazing.
http://www.naturecoast.com/hobby/holid.htm
A friend of mine has built a model from scratch, and it’s stunning.
If you’re really mad, I’ll reccommend C. Nepean Longridge: The Anatomy of Nelson’s Ships – I flagged it as a writing resource, but what it really is is a detailed instruction to modellers how to construct a ship of the line in miniature.
Oh, and if you check out Micro-Mark (www.micromark.com) they have all sorts of jigs and tools for those types of ship models.
We’ve been getting rid of stuff that belonged to a late housemate who was a horrible packrat (and a messy one; he’d buy games or Lego sets and leave pieces everywhere). We’ve hired a friend to help get rid of the junk. We’ve thrown out a hundred bags of garbage so far, not counting all the recycling. We’re probably going to have to get one of those portable dumpsters that they use for construction waste.
omg, that’s epic!