Almost ready for guests . . .

Moved on to dealing with the living room this weekend.  Got the furniture rearranged - better for having more people here, and I got most of the "stuff" that has been sitting around waiting to be donated moved out to the truck - although I haven't gotten it hauled away just yet.  When I got up this morning it was storming big time so I had no desire to leave home for anywhere.  And neither did Duke:

Although I had them locked out of the pasture, Duke COULD have gone out into his paddock to graze - there's plenty of grass out there at the moment -- but no . . . instead he just went inside, laid down and went to sleep. 
Hey -- I know just how he feels!

See that "scratching" piece there to the left of his door?  I just won another one from Valley Vet, so once that comes we'll take that one in the photo down (turns out none of them use it on the wall) and we'll put both of them around the post outside his stall.  He and Arthur will probably BOTH use them there.  We'll see. 

Anyway, as I started to say, I DID get the living room furniture moved around so that everyone can hang out together with fewer problems.  With the sofas angled like that, if someone needs to get in or out in the middle, no one else will have to get up to let them.  MUCH better.  Of course when I took this picture, I hadn't yet gotten all the paintings rearranged and put back up on the wall but that has been done now even if you can't see it here. 

I thought putting those blankets on the floor back there behind the recliner would work well for Boo, but apparently he is not impressed.  He still sleeps either on the wood floor or on the blankets over by the master bedroom door just outside this picture, so I guess I can stash those blankets before the company gets here.  ;-D

Now the only remaining issue is the guest bedrooms.  Because I THINK we will probably have both Wendy AND Vickie and John down at the same time next week, we need to pull off the French doors that are on that one guest room and take them outside so the glass can be sprayed with frosted glass paint to make the room private.  (Originally, we planned to make that room an office - that's why it wasn't "privitized" to begin with - but we put the office in the room up there that does NOT have an attached bath.) 

There is a sheer curtain on that near door, but obviously THAT isn't sufficient.
We never worried about it when there was just one guest upstairs since our own bedroom is downstairs, but if there's someone in BOTH upstairs guest rooms, those french doors WILL need to be "privatized" -- somehow.    (We also need to get all those bottom bookcase doors  filled in with SOMETHING one of these days.  Hey -- it's been 10 years since they were installed and we STILL haven't gotten that done.  Sigh.)

I WAS going to put window film that looks like stained glass on those french doors, but when I checked out samples of it at a local store, I saw that it still wouldn't actually be private ENOUGH.  And I know that the frosted glass paint does make it private enough, since that's what's on the outside French door in my own bathroom.  And although it will probably take a while for me to put painter's tape on those grids so the glass can be spray painted, it will be a lot less expensive anyway.  ($8 paint is significantly less than the $60+ the stained glass film would have costed, that's for sure!) 

Mark is moving their rig at the moment so his rig phones aren't working while the rig is being moved.  So I can't discuss any of it with him until they get where they're going early in the week, but he WILL be home on Wednesday, so I'm hoping we will have time to deal with everything by the time anyone gets down here.  I think Vickie and John are heading down by car on Friday so they'll probably get here on Saturday, but Wendy plans to fly and I haven't heard anything from her yet about when her flight will be arriving.   But I certainly hope she manages to get down here while I'm off work that week!