A Project

Now that we're in shelter-in-place mode, I need a project to keep me from driving everyone and myself crazy. I've been practicing the restricted movement/social distancing behavior for the week before the governor's declaration without a significant project and mostly it was going ok: I like the challenge of the stash-busting the freezer, the pantry and my yarn. I let the kids sleep in. I took lots of long walks (the dog is very tired.) But then on Sunday something snapped, I got really squirrelly and agitated and I couldn't get myself to stop checking the news every ten minutes. Even a 4.5 mile walk, time with the Tudors, knitting, tea and making gluten-free pecan sandies (decent, but not earthshaking) did little to dent how I was feeling. So yesterday I decided I need a project to direct my energy towards and decided that I will paint my office.

My office is blue and I am sick of it. I have about 3/4 of a gallon of cream paint leftover from when I painted the living room last year. It's probably not enough for two coats so I'll be scrounging around in the basement, looking for primer/other light colored paint to use for a first coat. The cream stuff has good coverage so hopefully, once I've prepped the walls, one coat will do it.

But before I can get to painting, I'm tackling the bookshelves which have long been a disorganized dumping ground. I'm going through, shelf by shelf, and culling the books that we don't want to read again. The big bonus of this is I have a LOT of books to give away and many of them are excellent reads (just not books I/we plan to read again.) So I'll be posting those and if you would like some of them and are local, I'll try to get them to you. Anything that isn't requested will go to the Friends of the Library bookshop once it is safe to donate materials again.

Here are three of the ten shelves in my office that I culled and dusted and are ready to be tarped for painting.  Look! On the middle shelf there is even room for NEW books!

 And here are two that still need some (ahem) significant attention. Lots of crap to wade through, organize and recycle.

I already cleared my desk which has never been so clean:

But the real challenge in getting this room ready to be painted is the fact that I share this office with my youngest child whose desk looks like this:

There are layers of crap/treasures to be excavated and organized and it is going to take some serious nagging and threats to torch the whole damn pile to get child-participation to happen. There used to be a little cleared space in the middle where computer work could take place, but since we had to purchase a laptop for the kid to be able to complete schoolwork this year, the desktop is mostly neglected and the whole space has devolved into a shit-hole dumping ground.

Wish me luck.