Still in the Basement

Groan...

There are parts of me that hurt that I was sure were no longer attached. DIY? Just say NO, people.

Actually, it's not all that bad. I can move my head, sort of. And my eyes. And I can see progress. Day 3 of the Great Renovation found me and the kids starting at 7 AM, being joined by my sweet honey at 5:00 and working straight through until 10 PM. It's no wonder parts of me mutinied.

We finished (most of) the wall and ceiling painting, unloaded the flooring from the van (OMG, I thought I'd die before my son and I got all 30-odd cases downstairs,) ripped up the old carpet padding, dragged all the old carpet plus the bagged padding to the street for trash day pickup, scraped the concrete floor, painted all the moulding and started the arduous task of emptying the bookshelves. Oh, and washed all the laundry in between.

Here's the thing about the library. My books are in (roughly) Dewey-decimal-system order. So, my grand plan was to take them off the shelves and stack them on top of each other on the floor, so they only need to be carried downstairs in their stacks to stay in order. Easy, right?

Dewey had no idea. Just because they're in HIS order does not mean they are STACKABLE!! Big books on top of little books...what a nightmare.

Now I have stacks of books rising up out of the toppled ruins of their neighbors, each one just waiting for the right moment to succumb to gravity on one side or the other, hoping to take out that haughty looking stable stack next to them.

On the bright side, I did manage to give away 200 books yesterday to a homeschool lending library that's just getting started. I can't get smug about it though...that still leaves 800+ to relocate. About those body parts...

Day 4 was just more of the same, except that we spent the morning out of the house at the King Tut exhibit at the Atlanta Civic Center. Y'all...I actually DROVE there myself! My first time of driving downtown without needing sedatives! Let me tell you, my GPS rocks!

Anyway, the exhibit was awesome, the kids were on their game, pointing to things, making intelligent comments enough to swell this homeschooling mom's heart with pride that I actually got through to them.

Afterward, I took them out to lunch and then back to the work-in-progress at home. My sweet honey was at home, too, so he and I finished laying (most of) the flooring last night. We just have two closets left to do, plus a tiny bit more painting. Install mouldings this afternoon, mop the new floor, and I think we can start hauling bookshelves down the stairs.

We decided to hold off painting the stairwell simply because Murphy will have us filling in holes in the drywall from sharp bookcase corners if we paint it first. It just makes sense to wait on that small detail.

Okay, I've loitered enough at the computer. I have to get back to work!