TheBanyanTree: moving stuff around

[Karen Cooper]

I'm still reading around the Tree, especially in its fabulous 
emu-tastic location.  Though I have to admit, I haven't been reading 
*every* day.  But Paul's post on Wednesday about his moving things 
around at home really struck a chord, 'cause that's what I've done 
for the last several days.

We have a couple of spare bedrooms since the kids grew up and moved 
out.  One's been a guest room and one's a library.  And our house has 
a little breakfast room off the kitchen, too.  Since we moved here, 
that little breakfast room has been my office.  I crammed into it an 
amazing amount of stuff: books, desk, two computers, filing cabinet, 
many small treasures, boxes filled with important treasures, hundreds 
of PEZ dispensers.  You get the idea.  It's a space about 8 by 8 
feet, and it has three doors and two large windows.  I hope you can 
imagine how desperately crowded I was.

We decided to move my office up to the guest room.  There's twice as 
much space, easily.  I could spread out my projects; it's an exciting 
idea.  But this started an endless cascade that I just don't see the 
end of.  To make room in the guest room, we needed to move the bed to 
the library, and to make room for the bed in the library we need to 
move the giant overstuffed chair to the breakfast room, and to make 
room in the breakfast room we needed to move my desk and filing 
cabinet up to the guest room but the bed left no room....

I stashed the bed in our room, and started moving things around.  I'd 
asked some friends over to help and we ended up with five willing 
folks.  Handy, when we found that we had to take off three doors to 
get various pieces of furniture in and out of the rooms where they 
were wanted.  But with all that help, it didn't really take that long 
to loop around the progression, and now my old office is a charming 
small sitting room, the library and guest room are combined, and I 
have a great big new work space.

That space is completely unusable.  I'd emptied my shelves and 
drawers into boxes so as make the furniture lighter to move and also 
to put things away quickly.  But, the shelves in the former guest 
room are covered with overflow books that should go into the library 
(but there's no space for them; those shelves are filled) or into the 
basement bookshelves (which is where the popular fiction and some 
reference books live).  Unless the library gets culled or we come up 
with a new strategy for putting things away, I can't use my new 
office.  And that doesn't even begin to cover the problem of not 
having an ethernet jack for my desk top computer.

Karen. [and, I already have some bags and boxes for the thrift store; 
I'm getting rid of as much stuff as I can.  Anyway... I'm just 
dropping in to report from the clutter wars]