Visible Progress

I realize it's been almost three weeks since my last post, but maybe someone should have warned me that going to work for a 40 person startup might mean I'd be busy. No, really, they want me to work and things.Well, work's not really the culprit. It is busy time there (and will be for a good while, in a really good way) but it's everything else that's been sucking up all my energy.The new office? The work on the house? Remember that room full of almost a hundred boxes of books and stuff?Remember this room full of books?Tonight I sorted through the final box. It's done. Well, it's getting there. My office is mostly done, with a few pieces of art to go on the walls, although I'm still trying to decide what else to add.With the living room painted, I've been able to get Laurie's cookbook collection onto the shelves, except for the three boxes that don't fit because they're full, and most of our general books are up in the other set of shelves. We've thrown out or recycled a lot of stuff as well, plus I've made 9 trips to the Goodwill trailer, at about 4 boxes or bags of stuff per trip, with another one in the car waiting for my next trip out. I'm guessing one more trip after this in this round.I've got another half dozen boxes of hockey books to get into the garage until their space is ready, and then I can -- start taking the main part of the hockey collection off the shelves and into storage so I can work on their new home.About half the art is back up in the living room, but two of my northwest carving pieces suffered damage in being moved around, mostly because the joinery was pretty poor, so I need to do some repairs. Pretty straightforward, but it requires some thinking and time.

Next on the docket

So, although there are still some books to shelve and boxes to store, this phase is basically done. The rest is tweaking. And it only took us, oh, god, six months. But a big chunk of the house is done and we won't need to think about it for the next decade.Next? In the next week we need to go pick and order carpet for the family room. If we get it bought this week, it'll get installed in early July. We were originally thinking of having the outside of the house this month, but with everything going on, I decided to wait. I'll work with contractor to do it in August, since I'll be heading to New Orleans for a company meeting in late July (yes, I'm getting on a plane, for the first time in forever. Whee! Um, Whee?)And I need to find a carpenter to come in and do some basic work on the next part of the house, mostly replacing doors and widening some openings, all non-structural. Maybe a week's work.Longer term: we have a plan for the family room and the library, and along the way, Laurie's room needs a complete redo and some carpentry work, but she needs to get things ready in there for that. And then the bathrooms and kitchen... I'm tempted to start planning on the kitchen now, but I think I want the family room and dining room done first. We'll see. One bathroom is a gut job and the kitchen is cabinets and counters with some simple electrical.I'm guessing we won't be completely done until next year, but the family room and library sometime this fall. The rest will happen when it happens.

Pictures!

A quick look at the now finished living room, with the two built-in bookshelves now in use. The big one is Laurie's cookbook collection, now fully shelved minus three boxes that simply won't fit. The shelves behind Tatiana is the "everything else" shelves, which really means the stuff that isn't cooking, isn't birding (my office), isn't hockey (mostly in storage while we get the hockey room ready. Yes, room) and whatever is in Laurie's office or in the shelves in the hockey room I haven't sorted yet.There will be more shelves going into the family room once I get it carpeted, and we expect that's where Laurie's collections will go until we get her office redone , and Laurie is, over time, going to purge the shelves, or make suggestions of what can be donated.I need to do updated pictures of my office, but it's a bit messy from my finishing up the living room, so I'll do that later in the week.I keep swearing my next hobby will involve carving marshmallows.

And off the Morro Bay

Once the painting was done, I realized I could take a couple of days off to unplug, so I headed off to Morro Bay (of course). The goal: make this a working trip where I unplug and focus on getting that Youtube Channel plan done and set up everything I need to launch. Since I expected to spend a lot of my time in the room working and not wandering around, I started looking for a nice comfortable place on AirBNB. This was going to be my first time using an AirBNB and this seemed like a perfect chance to try it.And... while going through the listings in Morro Bay, I found the Fisherman's House. It's a smallish 1 bedroom place, sitting on the dock at the edge of the Embarcadero right on the water -- if you look at the pictures, yes, that's a dock you see out the window. It's about 800 square feet, with a full kitchen, and a nice lounging area out on the dock, plus a nice family area. It's perfect for two people (but not for kids or pets; the dock isn't safe for either, and the local cat Tony might not appreciate your pet).It cost about 2X what my normal hotel in Morro would have cost, but for what I wanted to do, it was absolutely perfect. I had plenty of working spots, from the table to the couch to the dock, and it made it quite nice to sit and work on the business plan without spending the whole trip sitting on the bed. And it had a view.So I had an absolutely awesome time there, and I plan to head back down there with Laurie at some point. It's a great little cocoon spot, and Roni, the person who manages it, was completely awesome and helpful.I really needed the time off. The first night, I slept 10 hours, which defined my photography schedule, which boiled down to "I'm going to sit and watch things go by on the dock, have a nice dinner, and sleep in". In other words, not much, but honestly, the light was poor and the weather was wonderful, which meant no clouds or interesting sunsets. Fun to watch, not shoot.So I really did focus on the business plan, and finished it, and I really like it.And we'll talk about it in the next blog piece, and discuss what the next steps are and what that means in terms of prepping for launch.

And it's June...

And that's how you suddenly realize it's mid-June and you aren't sure where the six months went. To summarize: new job (at a startup!), roof repair, new carpet in two rooms, 40% of the house painted, 100 boxes of stuff boxed, moved, stored, moved, moved again, unboxed, sorted, shelved and stacked, or perhaps moved and stored again.Plus entirely new furnishings in my new office, new chests in the bedroom, shelves in the dining room, and some changes and new storage in the wine corner. All of which we can file under "scope creep".How time flies when you're having fun.And now on to the family room work...Whee!