Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Long Weekend Project

For me this weekend has been one of multitasking, project planning and breathing paint fumes. Over the course of the last year or so, the lovely wife and I began to realize that we were underutilizing part of our home. We live in an old Victorian sytle house with the separated room floor plan commoningly found in such structures. If you're familiar with Voctorians you already know the layout but if not I'll explain. In our house you don't come in the front door into a room but rather the entry hallway. You have dorways on your left and right, stairs leading to the second floor and, if you go straight you head back towards the dining room, the guest room and the kitchen. The roonm on the left we use for our Bible study and hangout room, the room on the right is the traditional "sitting room" complete with fireplace and the back bedroom has been turned into a library and bike room.

We realized that we never used the living room for a variety of reasons. Additionally, the library was trying to do too many things and, because of this is always cluttered. The living room had kind of become a place to dump everything abd looked like a disaster. So we decided to repurpose the room. Why not turn the sitting room that we never sit in into the library and return the back bedroom to that function along with a dual focus towards it being the bike room. So this weekend's project has been to do this. Why this weekend? Mainly because for once during this year we both have the same days off. It is fall break fo both of us and we have four days in which to work. Normally I would have wanted to go somewhere to get away, but we really felt like this had to get done.

I struggle with projects liek these because there are both serious time constraints and clutter problems. In every project, there is a point for me where things get just a bit too messy and a bit to complicated and I have to struggle with giving up. I was determined to avoid that this time. So, leading up to the project, I decided to do some extra cleaning to make some clutter free space available to retreat to when I needed a breather. It seems to have worked though no quite as well as I have hoped. Last night when the bookcases in the living room had to be emptied and moved so the wall behind them could be painted I was struggling. The other hard thing is that while all of this is going on we have to eat and get our laundry done and all the rest since we don't have a lot of catch up time this week and next weekend to do that.

Hence, I've been multitasking: edge something here, fold a load of laundry there, run to the store to get some forgotten tool, make a decision on some problem we hadn't anticipated, etc. I'm pretty sure we'll pull it all together today, though there's a lot to be done still. We'll be moving a lot of books around which is always tiring as well as trying to get the new room's arraingement set. This usually isn't a big deal since you can generally moving things around as needed to get it the way you'd like, even a few months after the fact. Unfortunately, you can't do that with eight foot tall loaded bookcases, so we've got to get close with those. We've got two possible set-ups; so we'll see which on we go with.

Thanks fo reading and wish us luck.

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