The lipstick almost outweighs the pig

A sort-of-nearby house is for sale again, after being sold earlier this year for more than $150k less than the current listing price.  Photos show exterior improvements still very much in progress.

It's been quite a while since I looked at local real estate listings.  Neighborhood houses continue to sell quickly for ridiculous prices.

By ridiculous, I mean 100% higher than ten years ago.  Which makes the property taxes more than 100% higher, thanks to recent school-funding proposals that easily passed.  

At the same time, the public school ratings range from poor to barely-middling.  The student populations are majority-nonwhite now.

About half of the incoming house-debtors immediately set up leftist yard signs in their yards.  

Yesterday I was in St. Paul.  I only saw one family's children outdoors on a drive of a couple miles through residential neighborhoods, but there were dozens of ICE OUT signs.

I recently calculated the cost per square foot of a city building project.  It was more than the cost for the Federal Reserve renovation that Trump roundly and soundly criticized.  

I just now threw together a very optimistic estimate of the building's cost per visit:  building cost divided by number of building users over the lifespan of the building.  It came out to $11 per visit.  The real number will be higher.

Storms it is

The snow somehow held off until we had finally gotten the yard stuff taken care of.  Since then there has been a whole series of domestic disruptions.  I've only just now gotten the house more or less in order, aside from the washer being broken.  

I happened to have picked up a short RV water hose from someone's curbside a few weeks ago, and so I  experimented with siphoning water out of the washer.  It sort of works if I get all the air out of the hose and bring the lower end down to a basin on the floor; it needs the difference in height to create enough suction for that size of hose, and it only worked for the top half of the water.  

After that, I experimented with using a short hose from the dehumidifier as a flexible water container:  lower entirely into the water, and then lift by both ends.  This worked, but the amount of water it can carry is very small.

I did wash a load of laundry in the bathtub using my antique Rapid Washer-style metal laundry plunger, and experimented with setting wire shelving over the laundry room sink as a place for draining water out of the laundry.  However, really, a stronger force than gravity is needed.

Future loads are waiting until the landlord deals with the washer in one way or another, or until I finish recovering from this cold.

I am appreciative now of two projects I did a while back, which was to take some free-from-a-neighbor bathroom tiles, and two wooden panels from a deconstructed TV armoire, and make two tiled panels:  one for the kitchen behind the wastebasket, and one for the bathroom between the toilet and the side wall; both protecting the walls against family members with bad aim.  Both panels are just leaning against the wall, not attached.  One I finished with grout in the tile joints, and the other with white caulk and a band of paint along the top edge.  Both are much easier to scrub clean than the wall paint, and being speckled white instead of weary beige, they help to brighten the rooms.

The painted wooden frame in the living room now has large red Christmas bells hanging from it.

The apples are for the most part keeping far better than I expected, given their condition when we picked them.  I haven't done much more than sort through them every week or so to pick out the ones that are going bad, and cook up the ones that are partly salvageable.

I realized a year or two ago that the purpose of food is not to be eaten, but to be available to be eaten.

The 'cleaning reflex' was triggered

Yesterday I took apart my living room, down to rolling up the Very Nice Rug and taking it outside and letting little children jump around on it.

The fall cleaning was long overdue, but it was initiated, in this case, by a child throwing a pinecone and breaking a storm window.

The pinecones were free, from church, but they turned out to be an expensive lesson for that child.

Anyway, having figured out the magic secret of removing the screen and the other storm window--it seems like it is a different secret for every rental we've lived in--I was able to clean the whole window, and then went on to wash the outsides of the other first-floor windows.

Returning inside, with the kids' desktop computers already disconnected to get at the window, I decided to keep going, slowly.

The children wanted the computer table moved to a different wall, and I wanted to move the toy shelf somewhere less prominent, replacing it with bookshelves that were already in the room.

I took out one end table, which used to function as a perch for little children and now only accumulates clutter.

The toy shelf went in front of a window.  I put our very rustic red dollhouse on it, knowing that our cat likes to curl up in one of the upstairs rooms.  Now she can watch both the family and the outside world from up there.  The rest of the dollhouse is again being used for drawing and coloring supplies.  

Lawn chair webbing, and other maintenance

I was experimenting this morning with ironing layers of milk jug plastic together--with a layer of baking parchment paper to protect the iron--in the hopes of making a solid enough material for a lawn chair seat.

I gave up after a while.  The plastic bonded poorly, tended to warp and wrinkle, and was rather brittle after it cooled down.

Next idea:  use a big piece of synthetic upholstery fabric to make "giant bias tape"--bands of folded fabric, only with the fabric cut with the grain instead of diagonally as done with real bias tape--and then to use the bands as webbing.

I figured a triple thickness of the fabric would be enough.  I now have the bands cut and the "raw" edges secured with stitching.

The next step, and the hardest one, will be to attach these to the chair frame so that the connectors don't tear out.

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In other work, I managed to pull off the hot glue that I had used to winterize my bedroom window.  Last summer it was on there very firmly, but a second year of temperature changes weakened the bond a lot.  So now I can open the window.

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We've been around to a number of neighborhood yard sales, and we found many useful items, in particular jeans and work pants for teenage boys, and several pairs of shoes that fit me and a child.  I had been in a mall shoe store not long before, where there were practically no acceptable shoes, so it was very timely to find the yard sale shoes.

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I finally got to a leather store, and bought some utility leather for re-covering indoor chair seats.  I've learned from a previous attempt that fabric store vinyl is much less durable than the original vinyl.  If the leather doesn't survive, I'm going to use steel plate.

Putting the leather on took a while, mostly in trying to wrap it gracefully around the corners, given that the leather was too thick to have more than two layers of it on the underside of the seat.  I used carpet tacks from the home improvement store, which worked fine.

Chugging along

I've been doing a lot of organizing and cleaning, and also a little decorating.

The plastic blinds in the kitchen were very bad when we moved in, and I just took them down and bagged them up--I hate mini-blinds too much to spend money on buying new ones.

I finally got around to washing them in the bathtub.  Hot water, dish soap, and spray cleaner had little effect on the thick, tenacious goo that was on them except to soften it a little.  What did work was to scrub with a drippy mixture of baking soda and water.  They came out looking almost new.

To dry the blinds before storing them again, I figured out a way to suspend them from the shower curtain rod by hanging two clothes hangers on it first, and then slipping each end of the top of the blinds into a hanger.

I came out only a little ahead in the end, though, because some little child decided to break one slat, and then another, of the bathroom blinds. I will splint them back together.

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I did a quick decorating project of covering a half-painted canvas--that my husband picked up from some curbside a while back--with fabric, and hanging it on the wall.  I used tacks salvaged from one of my de-upholstery projects.  I put the nail into the wall a little too low, and then compensated by putting a small wooden spool onto the nail before hanging the panel back up.

I used to cover pieces of plywood with fabric, stapled on, and lean them against the wall to hide electrical outlets from the baby, or put them under crates that would otherwise scratch the floor.

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I looked through the mending bag, and found that I have an even dozen pairs of children's pants waiting to be mended.  I'm going to have to switch thread on the sewing machine.  The thread in it now is very prone to jumping free of the thread guides and creating slack that then tangles down inside the machine.  I was making a quick pillowcase for a seat cushion, and had to pause every few stitches to make sure the thread was behaving itself decently.

The seat cushion was for the deconstructed chair in the library.  I also added one piece of the wood to the back, with short drywall screws, and worked out a way to semi-attach the chunks of redwood beam that it is sitting on to each other, so they're not shifting and letting the chair fall over.

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In other tinkering, we replaced the light bulbs in a bedroom with ones of a warm color temperature, and found out why the glass shade was on upside-down--it is too small to accommodate full-size light bulbs.  I worked out a way of suspending it a little lower using a bolt, a nut, and a couple of washers, with the bolt running up through the center of the original hanger, and being secured from falling back out with the nut.  It was a three-handed job, and I might go back and add a short tube as a spacer to steady the shade.

Tying up loose ends

I finished the coat.  The recipient reports that it feels like a life jacket.  I tried it on myself, and it's not quite that bad.

After that, I moved on to getting a number of things around the house into better order, and getting some deep cleaning done.

That was interrupted by a domestic crisis, which the landlord promptly dealt with.  He mentioned that the first floor layout was different when he bought the house, which explains some of its quirks around the dining area. 

Now I'm back to getting things done.  Today I mended an old kitchen towel, and then boiled it in water and baking soda to see what would come off it.

The water turned brown, I couldn't see the bottom of the saucepan, and I only boiled it a couple of minutes. 

A few years ago I tried something similar with washed bath towels in the bathtub, and the results were the same.

I think I need a laundry stove.

Braided rug repairs

Both of my braided rugs had spots where the lacing was breaking.  Not surprising in the larger one, which spent most of winter outdoors a few years ago, while I was deciding if I wanted to keep it.  The wool in the braids came through that fine, but the cotton rug warp yarn that I used to lace them together didn't.

The repairs were simple, but tedious:  pull out the lacing back to where it is good enough, tie on a new piece, thread the other end into a blunt yarn needle, and re-lace until the other end can be tied.

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We have a door where the doorknob assembly has a loose plate that won't stay up against the door like it is supposed to.  There are no screw holes, just two tiny spikes on the back, which won't hold at all, unless I pound on it.  I figured out a way of winding leather lacing around the doorknob shaft so the plate can't slide.

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I also began working on the edge of the living room rug.  I'm doing a row of whip stitches along the worn edge, using crewel-weight wool yarn, to cover and protect the bare threads. I happened to have yarn that goes well with the rug.  A lot of our things are survivors from the '80s when country blue was a trend, and they coordinate well.

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We had a good Thanksgiving, just ourselves, and then on Saturday Grandma came in with ten dozen homemade sugar cookies and everything needed to decorate them in a well-planned operation. Those cookies are in her garage in tins now, waiting for Christmas. It will be fun to see them again and recognize who decorated what. She also brought some cookies just for eating on the spot--store-bought cookies that she mostly bought for the tins.

Marking time

Both of the governor candidates here want to allow expansion of sports gambling to mobile devices, for the tax revenue.  The city government has put a pause on the sale of marijuana-derived products, probably so they can figure out how to tax it.

I've continued to make small improvements around the house.  For two shelves in shallow cupboards, I put a board across the front of the shelf to turn it into a built-in bin.  The board just rests against the inside of the cupboard's face frame.  The shelves hold small towels and washcloths, which I don't take the time to fold and stack neatly.

I sewed up ripped leather on a child's shoe with dental floss. Needed my leather thimble to push the big needle through the leather.  I also finally got around to mending a few items of clothing.  Still have some slippers and braided rugs and I don't know what else to repair.  Neighbors handed a very nice large rug down to us; it is in good condition except for wear at the edges, which I think I can deal with with some turkey stitch (tufted) embroidery.

I gave up on my bedroom closet office plans, and started using the space for craft supply storage.  I finally found my misplaced bedsheet, which I had cleverly stored among some spare pillowcases.

The weather has been very dry, but I saw that rain was finally coming, and got most of the rest of the leaves raked up before it hit.

The children have been doing good work.  It's been fun to see the older ones teaching the younger ones.

Mending tiny holes in a vinyl floor

Over time, some tiny holes have appeared in our "linoleum" kitchen floor, which is otherwise in good condition for its age. Judging by the style, it must be at least twenty years old.

My preferred fix is to touch up the holes with nail polish, which dries very quickly and is durable and somewhat flexible at the same time. The best time to do touch-ups is right before waxing the floor.

I ended up buying the two colors of nail polish that were nearest to the colors in the vinyl, and mixing small amounts of them as needed.

I used a bamboo skewer to apply the nail polish to each hole, and then blotted it lightly with a scrap of fabric. At that point, the hole generally disappeared from casual view.

Nail polish shrinks quite a bit as it dries, so you can't expect to fill a hole and have it be level with the rest of the floor.

Of course, after I waxed the floor, I found a number of other little holes that needed fixing. I wasn't entirely happy about putting the nail polish on over the floor wax--which is actually a polymer, and which in my opinion would likely be dissolved by the acetone in the nail polish.

But since the holes were bothering me, I went ahead and fixed those, too. There was no visible effect on the floor wax around the spots I painted. There is a difference in reflectance between the nail polish and floor wax, though, which makes the fixes visible at certain angles, at close range.

Some people are preparing, and what to do if toilet paper is sold out

I haven't been in the bigger stores recently, but my husband reports that there are sections of bare shelves here and there. One of these was for toilet paper.

But there is a substitute for toilet paper:  reusable cloth wipes that are sometimes called "family cloth".  There's an introduction to family cloth here from a family that uses it. These wipes are best made from cut-up cotton rags, preferably flannel or jersey from old T-shirts.  Jersey doesn't need hemming; flannel wipes will last longer if they are hemmed, but it's not strictly necessary.

In our house we don't use cloth wipes for the whole family, only for the babies. I highly prefer cloth wipes to disposable baby wipes; they just get the job done a lot better. I wash them along with the cloth diapers. With the "high-efficiency" washer at our house, I do a cold water wash first, with an extra rinse, and then another wash on the Sanitize cycle. In a non-HE washer, I would just wash them on Hot for the second wash, but the HE washers don't use the hottest of the available hot water for their Hot cycles.

I don't use bleach on the diapers or wipes, although I might if I were using a coin laundry. Mostly for the protection of my own family. The USDA (I think it was) did a study on bacteria in washing machines some years ago, and found that the washers were not sterilizing the laundry and that bacteria could very well be passed from load to load. The heat of the dryer, or direct sunlight in line-drying, reduces that risk quite a bit, I believe.

The main obstacle to us using family cloth full-time at our house is the extremely high risk that the wipes would be absentmindedly thrown into the toilet and flushed.

Covering a hole in the wall

We had a new water shut-off valve to an outside faucet put in. This required cutting a hole into the top of the wall in our basement family room.

Afterward, I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what to do with the hole. Part of the trouble is that the valve handle projects out about an inch from the wall surface. And we need to be able to get to it, occasionally, and turn it.

I started making a sort of panel to cover it, but gave up after a while because of the access issue.

Eventually, I got the idea of just making a little curtain to cover the hole. I found a piece of fabric, and figured out what size to cut it--usually a curtain should be at least 1.5 times wider than the opening you want it to cover, for fullness. I hemmed it on three sides, and made a tunnel for a rod on the other.

In our hardware stash I found a short tension curtain rod that was a good length for this project.

The next thing was figuring out how to hang it all up. I saw that since the hole was at the top of the wall, and the curtain and rod were very light, one possibility would be to hook onto the ceiling drywall.

A slight disadvantage is that the curtain would not hang any wider than the hole at the top, because of the hooks. Below, it could fan out a little.

For hooks, I first thought of using wire in the shape of upside-down Ls. But it seemed to me like the downward pull of the curtain rod would tend to make the hook tip, rest only on the corner of the drywall, and then possibly slide right off.  (I later confirmed this with a small paper-clip model.)

My second idea was to bend the wire in the shape of a 6, with the top curved over enough so that the weight would rest on the drywall on a single point, which would be safely away from the edge. The curtain rod ends would go through the loops of the sixes.

For wire, I found two handles from Chinese take-out boxes that I had saved at some point. I bent them to match, and tried them out. They worked well, and the curtain is definitely an improvement over the bare hole. The folds of the curtain even disguise the projection of the shut-off handle.

Warren makes me tired

She doesn't just want to go in for another round of screwing up health insurance, she also wants to completely overhaul the energy and housing sectors.  As in M4A, this would involve massive amounts of taxpayers' dollars and incredibly complex tangles of laws, regulations, and brand-new government programs...for a sustainability score of 0, right off the bat.

Our local electric and gas utility is already proposing changes to radically reduce carbon emissions, including early retirement of all their coal-powered plants. The state Public Utilities Commission is asking for public comments, and I certainly have some to give them.

For housing, Warren is promising to "lower rents by 10%".  While at the same time promising under her 100% Clean Energy proposal to refurbish 4% of existing buildings and houses each year to make them "green". Supposedly this will be done through the magic of federal funding.

If I do a quick estimate, guessing that there are 150 million buildings that would be affected, with an average cost of $50,000 to upgrade each building, that would be $300 billion per year, or $0.3 trillion; $7.5 trillion over 25 years. Plus a few gazillion dollars to "decarbonize" electricity generation, and a few gazillion more to take away most of our fossil-fueled vehicles. This makes it a modest proposal, actually, compared to the multi-trillion-dollar annual cost of her Medicare for All plan.

I found this laughable:

I’ll also invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, including ensuring that every federal interstate highway rest stop hosts a fast-charging station by the end of my first term in office, and ensuring that charging stations are as widespread and accessible tomorrow as gas stations are today.

Given the difference in time between filling a gas tank and charging an electric vehicle (currently in the tens of minutes with Teslas, for a partial supercharge), I don't think that is going to look exactly like she thinks it will. The charging stations would have to be much more widely accessible than gas stations are today, and the sensible thing to do would be to place them mostly at peoples' destinations.

Her affordable housing plan will do little to improve my family's housing affordability or security. It would help if we weren't paying out the equivalent of another place's rent every month for health insurance, thanks in part to Senator Warren's Yes vote on the Affordable Care Act. There was, a few years back, someone who did the math and compared their monthly health insurance cost to the mortgage payment on a $400,000 house; they weren't wrong.

Happily, even if Warren were to win the Presidency, she wouldn't be able to get any of this legislated without the Democrats retaking a majority in the Senate.

If you're going to do wood countertops...

...this is the way to do them.

I've used the spar urethane that they used on the countertop a few times before, and I like the stuff a lot. One project was a set of shelves with a projecting counter, built of 2x4s, 2x2s, 1x10s, and plywood, which I built for additional shelf and counter space in our tiny apartment kitchen. Several moves later, we still have it, but now it is serving as a somewhat wobbly workbench in the basement.

After reading her post, out of curiosity I went to see how well the urethane on the counter of that shelf had held up. Originally, I put two good coats on, and called it good. Now it is very much dented and scraped up by tools, but it is all still there, except for a couple of chips on the edge, and one place where someone sawed into it a little.

I also used the stuff on my plywood hot tub, the furo, way back when. I put at least ten coats on the inside. Spar urethane does not fill in gaps, I found, without some assistance (toothpicks, in this case). It did leak just a little after a few years of use, but it was set up in a shower, so it didn't matter.

The most recent project was the bathroom stool, where the urethane is holding up very nicely...unlike most of the other finishes in there.

Direction

I've been thinking about the runner some more, and looking at the materials that we have.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I could pray and ask for one.

The answer that came back immediately was that I already had everything I needed to make it.

I take that as meaning that I should go with the best option that I have on hand, the repurposed jute, and for coloring it use acrylic paints that I have.

As I mentioned previously, knitting it will use the quantity of jute that I have most economically.  This knit rug will be going over the existing bits of carpet.

Earlier I researched possible knitting patterns, and did a test swatch. I think I can get away with using multiple knitting needles across the width, so I won't have to make longer needles.

The reason I was hesitating to use the jute is that it is not really a very strong or durable fiber.  But if I color it with diluted acrylic paint, that will help it a bit.

In a previous attempt to use paint as dye, I had problems with it not dissolving evenly, so this time I am going to thin it down more gradually, and it will probably help that I have better-quality paint than I did then.

Coming together

I am a bit amazed at how the bench and the table fit so well up against each other.

I've been brainstorming a list of runner possibilities. I have studied making homemade rugs for quite a few years, so I have plenty of ideas.  Here are some of them:

Use the jute from my crocheted bedroom rug to make a rug that goes over the carpet remnants. I've already unraveled it. To make it cover the area that I want probably requires knitting or weaving; crochet uses much more fiber to cover a given area. Then I would dye it to the color I want.

Overdye the carpet remnants.  Did you know that dyeing your old wall-to-wall carpet was possible? The internet says that it only works for nylon or wool, though. The way to tell if it's nylon is to take a little bit of the fiber off, and burn it (under controlled conditions, of course).  Supposedly burning nylon should melt and form a small, clear bead on the burnt end. The other way is to immerse it in a little chlorine bleach overnight; if it is nylon, the bleach will eat it away entirely within 12 hours. So the internet says. Wool will smell like burning hair when it is burnt.

When I tried the burn test, however, it didn't look like nylon to me--I think it is probably acrylic--and in any case, it is dirty and probably wouldn't take dye very well.

Make a braided rug, probably from wool yarns. This would be somewhat time-consuming, and definitely expensive. The advantage of using yarns over fabrics is that you don't need to fold the raw edges in, so it goes much faster.

Weave a rug.  That requires finishing my current weaving project, which is currently stalled at 25% complete.

Flip the carpet remnants over and paint the backing, which is woven plastic. I'm not sure how well the paint will adhere, though, and I would consider this a temporary solution at best. The painted texture is not going to sit well with some family members.

Find a used runner and overdye it.

Use my drawer full of shrunken wool clothing, which could be cut up and applied to a backing and dyed. I did a bit of searching for local sources of industrial felt, and haven't really found any.

Buy enough yarn to get started, and knit a rug in a loop stitch.

Buy a length of canvas, and make a floorcloth.

Walls almost done, and thinking about a runner

I filled the empty space on the wall with my elf house (which has acquired a few more elvish furnishings over the years). That puts it in a much more visible place than it was before. I also put the rope that I was hanging kid's artworks on back up. 

With those done, the walls are just about done.  There is one more area that seems to need filling.

I also backed up a step or two in the process and thought about what to do with the entry runner. We've had the landlord's carpet remnants there continuously, and I would like to do something different and better, in a very dark green color.

I remembered that we had some fake grass (aka Astroturf) in the garage. I never used it before because I didn't like the plastic texture, and because it sheds little bits around the edges.

But I pulled it out, and found that we have two pieces of it, one of which is almost exactly the size I want.  In color, it was quite a bit brighter than I wanted, although not as bright as I remembered it being.

Family opinion was deeply divided on the texture. Several of the children thought it was a perfect place for a picnic, and for scattering toy "flowers".  Another one joined me in hating the feel of the plastic.

One problem was discovered:  spills go straight down through it.  Since the runner is the place where most of the snowy boots get parked, it needs to have absorbency.  A second problem is that the bright color makes the rest of the room look faded and worn.

So I decided to put the fake grass in the bedroom of the children who love it--the carpet in there is a hideous greige--and keep using the carpet remnants until I find something better.

Minimizing the smoke detector

This is the one that is smack in the middle of a wall that is one of the room's main focal points.  The smoke detector is still there, I haven't moved it, but what I have done is to bring in strongly-colored and more attractive objects at a lower elevation, to draw the eye downward, and to let the white smoke detector visually fade into the upper wall.

This approach I would say is partially successful.  There's some empty wall space at a middle height that seems to want to be filled.

On to the walls

The past couple of days I've made only incremental progress in our school room.

First I had various misadventures trying to do touch-up painting on the walls, starting with using the wrong color of paint--not hard, in a house that has three or four different shades of beige on the walls. Then, after I found the paint can with the right color, it was still the wrong color, because the paint was so old.  Those Magic Erasers for walls have been very helpful.

Then, I pulled out the things that we used to have on the walls, and tried them in various places to see which ones I wanted to use. The results were inconclusive, because most of them are too small, except for one or two that are much too large.  Also, the nails in the walls are much too high, and I am very reluctant to make additional nail holes, now that I know that I can't touch them up very well.

Today I did something that I should have done earlier, and moved my homemade coat hook rack into the school room. It fits in well, somehow makes that wall look much more finished, and connects the colors in the school room with the ones in the dining room. It is also needed there, since my husband has decided that parking the car in the relatively warm garage in the winter only makes the road salt eat holes in it faster, so we use the front door in the winter.

I was curious and measured the width of the coat closet, which is about two and a half feet. That is fine for a family of four in California--ranch style house--but not for a much larger family in Minnesota.

The other thing I accomplished was that some small assistants helped me determine that next to the front door would be a good place for a mirror of moderate size. I have one that would work, but I am very reluctant to move it off my closet wall.

Toilet seat paint job update

This summer I gave the toilet seat another repainting; it really needed it.

Looking back at my original post on this, and the one on the repainting after that, it looks like a toilet seat paint job will last for about six months in my busy household.

The initial cost was about $8, and I think I still have enough primer and paint left to do one more round. So it is costing us about $2 per six months, or $4 per year, to keep the current toilet seat going. That doesn't count the labor involved, which is roughly two hours each time, though much of that is 
spent waiting for the paint to dry enough to put on the next coat.

A new seat would last us 3-4 years, and would cost something like $10 per year. That puts my "hourly wage" for this work at maybe $1.50 per hour, which is lower than what I usually aim for.

Some observations

Our school room, without all the books and the rugs and the curtains and the coats and shoes, is LOUD. The sound bounces all around the room, sometimes doing more than one lap, I think, and it's not just the sounds generated within the room, but also those from adjoining rooms and outdoors.

It made me appreciate how much the carpet in the other areas of the house are quieting them, even though I thoroughly loathe that beige carpet.

I had the furniture more or less arranged, but I kept getting Ideas, and with the shelves empty, I could try them out fairly easily. I tried using one bookshelf as a sort of room divider, separating the entry area from the rest of the room. It was an intriguing option, but I decided against it, because it was blocking light and kind of fighting against the architecture of the room. There was also the matter of anchoring the bookshelf securely so that it wouldn't tip.

That particular bookshelf actually ended up somewhere else entirely:  downstairs, where there is a niche in the hallway that I have been thinking of making a bookshelf for. It just fits, and only because the light fixture there has the ability to swivel; I'm still discovering things about this house, after living here for several years.

Today I moved most of the books back. I think we may have too many.