Now that we finally have access to the attic and have seen just how much room there is up there, I have been toying with the idea of expanding the plywood flooring to provide even more storage space. I should point out that we have more than enough storage space in the house without the attic, but there is something about the prospect of having even *more* which is far too compelling to ignore.

The problem, however,is that with the exception of where they put the 8x8 square of flooring when the house was built, the attic is covered in loose piled insulation. And as the little yardstick things stuffed into the piles of insulation here and there suggest, the quality of the insulation (its rating) is dependent on the height. Putting flooring over that would squash it down, reducing its insulating capacity. We could, I suppose, go through and replace all the loose insulation in the main area of the attic (where I'd like to see flooring) with the more solid, condensed form, to avoid losing any insulating capacity, but that's a much bigger and more complicated task than I'm sure we want to tackle. There is also the possibility of building the flooring up, so that it 'hovers' over the piled insulation through the judicious placement of some 2x4's and bracing, but that is going to take some careful calculations and thought.

In the meantime, however, there is at least a little space available up there. So today, after breakfast, Richard and I dragged all the holiday stuff out of the closet in the library and transferred it from the various huge bins and cardboard boxes into five clear stackable bins bought specifically for this purpose. Then Richard stood on the ladder and I handed him all the holiday decoration bins and the boxes of lights we put up around the house, and a few other things, and he shoved them all up into the attic because now we finally can.

Next I tackled my ever growing yarn stash. It took an additional trip to Costco to pick up another set of the 10 clear plastic bins I bought for that purpose, but when I was done, I'd managed to stuff all my yarn into smaller and more manageable containers, and stacked them all into the newly emptied closet. Not very exciting, maybe, but it's nice to feel slightly more organized, and better yet, to be able to actually *find* things in my stash, instead of having to rummage through a huge green tub and never quite knowing what I might find.

While we were out picking up the second set of plastic storage boxes for my yarn we took a slight detour for a little shopping, because we were both desperately in need of new shoes. I find it highly amusing I at when we left the store, Richard had more pairs of new shoes than I.