We’ve finished painting the walls of our home office, one of two repurposed bedrooms (the other is Donna’s sewing & embroidery workshop). Donna’s going to sand and repaint the baseboards, which the flooring guys will reinstall when they come. I guess the last thing will be the reinstallation of the wall unit and Murphy bed. Well, no … in order to clear the decks for all the work that needed to be done we had to take everything out of the home office … putting it all back is the last thing.
Several days of work remain. Meanwhile, old friends are stopping by for a few days in early October. The home office may not be done by then, but that’s okay because our friends will stay in the guest bedroom. Right now that room’s full of home office stuff. And what an incredible amount of stuff that is: clothing, framed artwork and photos, plaques & career mementos, boxes and boxes of important papers, letters, and records … we aren’t pack rats, but damn, we’ve collected a lot of stuff over the years.
We’re putting wood laminate flooring in the home office next week, so except for reinstalling the wall unit and Murphy bed, the office will be done and we can start putting everything back in it, freeing up the guest bedroom. It’ll work out. If the contractors stay on schedule. If the Good Lord is willin’ and the creek don’t rise.
All this work brings back memories of a life on the move, clearing and cleaning quarters every three years in order to move halfway around the world to new postings, reversing the process upon arrival, and every single time having to strip wallpaper and repaint … sometimes just a room or two, sometimes an entire house. I thought we were done with that when we moved into this house 19 years ago (the longest we’ve ever lived anywhere by a factor of seven), but of course we aren’t, and never will be. There’s one more move in our future, the one we avoid talking about, never mind planning for.