Getting ready for Christmas!

I have to keep reminding myself that Christmas is coming soon because it seems so much like summer around here currently. The general daytime temperatures are in the 80's at the moment!  Love it!  Of course tomorrow is supposed to be a huge storm -- 2 inches of rain and extremely high winds -- so maybe it'll get cooler finally.  We'll see.

But we ARE trying to get the house straightened up before everyone comes by for Christmas -- well, not "everyone" but actually Mark's sister and brother-in-law, and my own daughter and her guy as well.  I sure am looking forward to that, but the house sure does need a lot of changes!

We've actually gotten a lot done over the last couple weeks. We got all those books and magazines out of the room that WAS the upstairs library -- we wanted it to be just a second living room.

That corner bookcase is FULL of  only horse books and magazines.
Sure love those things!

. . . or maybe we should consider that room an office.  Mark's computer and printer and file cabinets, etc. have been moved out of what was previously an office for both of us, and it's now in the center of that large upstairs room.  

So here's what you see when you reach the top of the stairs - his office, huh?

But once you're all the way up there you can see the "living room" beyond Mark's desk.

That computer desk is why it does seem to be an office as you first go in.  But once you get up there and sit down it actually seems more of a living room. And he can watch that big TV while he's sitting there at his computer now instead of watching that small TV that used to be on his desk.  (That one is in one of the extra bedrooms up there now instead.)  

And we obviously got those bookcase doors closed in finally as well. Those bookcases were built back when we fixed up this house before moving in -- more than 10 years ago -- and those doors have been wide open since then until this weekend.  Wow!  FINALLY!

 This is that room before:

So here's what those bookcases fastened to the wall looked like from the time they were built (back in 2002) until last weekend when we added those dark red woods to those bottom doors (as you can see in that photo two pictures above).

As you can see in those above photos, we've also removed SO many books and magazines out of the bookcases, as well as out of our regular downstairs living room as well.  Of course instead of having four bedrooms, we now have only three because currently there are dozens of boxes of books and other things we don't feel we actually need now inside what used to be our office.  Check it out:

Soooo much "stuff" taken out of the main room and stuck into that one bedroom so we can put off figuring out whether to throw them out, donate them to Goodwill, or hand them over to someone who would want them.  

You can't see it in this photo because of that box on the bed, but behind it is a whole batch of folders taken out of the file cabinets.  I need to go through them and decide if they need to go back into the file cabinets that have been moved or if they can be thrown away. 

There's also still a queen sized bed in there as well, but it's sure not currently a bedroom since you can't move around in there with all those boxes of stuff all over.  In fact, the bed itself is covered with folders that were removed from the file cabinets if they're not currently necessary.  After everyone leaves after Christmas I'm going to make myself go up there and check out all those files to see if they need to be trashed or placed inside any of the current file cabinets.  But two of those file cabinets are now inside our downstairs living room next to the desk that I used at the office until I retired where I'm now keeping my own computer.  I WAS going to get a new laptop after my old one broke, but with my old desk right there in the living room, I can watch TV down there while using a regular computer so I have no need for a laptop anymore.  And I LOVE using this large screen -- WAY larger than any of those laptops!

Of course at the moment I'm checking out thousands of photographs down here, so I'm not taking a photo of MY computer setup since it's absolutely FULL of photographs at the moment!  So . . . later.  I will need to get things put away by the time our family folks show up beginning in just a week or so.  Okay.  Back to work on those photos and away from the blog for ANOTHER week or so.  Good grief.  I really thought I'd be adding MORE blog info after I got retired.  Well -- apparently not.  Sigh.