Middle bedroom thoughts, and other house work

So here I sit getting ready to head to lunch, and I find myself with a few minutes to write something. 

Jenny and I have been working lately on things that have been vaguely house-related, but have been covered in other entries.  We’ve been hanging curtains to replace some of the nasty old ones that came with the house when I bought it.  We’ve been cleaning (and cleaning, and cleaning some more) for various social gatherings.  We have been re-organizing the back bedroom so that it could function again as a guest bedroom and not be quite so cluttered.  We’ve been working on general yard upkeep.  We’ve been hosting social gatherings for various events.  I’ve been in the woodshop making gifts and working on a few small shop projects to help me to make those gifts.  We’ve also been spending some time resting from work and doing some things that we enjoy, like picnics and a little bit of bike riding and the like.  The rest of the time has been spent working or tending to other obligations that have been keeping us both quite busy this spring. 

While all of this has been going on, we’ve been thinking, too, about projects in the house.  I’m working on getting a few estimates for the work on the porch, which we must absolutely do soon.  I also need to meet with our landscaper friends to get an estimate on repairing the retaining wall that borders the alley.  The wall might be able to wait a little bit.  The porch cannot wait any longer. 

I’ve also been thinking about the work in the middle bedroom that we want to do.  That was the first project that I ever started in the house.  It ended up getting back-burnered for a lot of reasons.  My sister and her former boyfriend helped to strip some of the wallpaper in there that I hadn’t finished, so the really hard part of wallpaper stripping is essentially all finished.  There’s a lot of the old, thick adhesive left on some parts of the walls, but that dissolves pretty easily with Dif.  We also have to think about whether we want to do the woodwork in that room–I would love to do it, but we need to determine if it is feasable.  There are some odd electric issues in the room, too.  There’s nothing really problematic, but some odd things were done to get outlets into different spots in the room, and I need to have my Dad come down to help me figure out what we’re going to do about the resulting mess.  The room will need a light fixture (it didn’t have one when I bought the house–just a crappy ceiling fan that used to have a light fixture below it).  The room will also need a throw rug to cover the middle section of the floor.  The outside few feet are all hardwood, but the middle section is just unfinished subfloor boards that bring the middle part of the floor level to the hardwood.  Odd, yes, but we can deal with it. 

Before we can do anything in there, though, we need to clean out all of the stuff.  The room has become our storage room.  Some stuff needs to be sold or given away.  Some stuff needs to be stored for possible future use by other people.  Some stuff needs to be stored because it means something to us.  Some stuff just needs to be thrown away.  That’s going to be a big job.  I want to start going through that stuff soon to figure out what is going where. 

I’ve also been thinking about some needed stuff for the house, including a linen closet on the second floor to hold all of our towels, sheets, etc.  I have plans for some small tables that I’m building for us to use outside on the porch.  I also have some more gifts to make for people for various things. 

Oh, did I mention that this is my last "free" weekend until probably the middle of July?  Argh. 

So there it is.  Now it is lunchtime. 

jonathan