The floor downstairs, in case you were wondering, is still not done. We’d intended to tackle it again this weekend, in fact (yes, I know, you’ve heard *that* before), but we got stalled by the fact that one of the transition trips came completely out when we tried to adjust the existing boards, and the next strip we tried to install ended up in the wrong place, and after that we decided to give up on the floor for a few more days and work on more pressing matters instead.

These more pressing matters included, among other things, installing a towel rack in the downstairs bathroom, swapping out the shower head downstairs for one we like much better, painting a bookshelf for the upstairs bathroom (which did not fit in the space it was meant to go, so the bookshelf is back in ‘pending’ status until I figure out what to do with it), and most importantly, installing a pet door into the door to the laundry room. This, naturally, necessitated the purchase of a new tool – a keyhole saw. I suspect that owning this house is going to result in the purchase of a whole lot more new tools before we are done. One of these years we might even have someplace to put all of these tools we keep accumulating. In the meantime, the cats have all figured out how to get through the pet door (through the simple act of catching as many as we could, and stuffing them through the door manually, then walking away and letting them muddle their way back out when they felt like it), and Richard and I are breathing huge sighs of relief. The laundry room may now smell like a cattery, but the rest of the house is litterbox-odor free.

We also did a bunch of unpacking this weekend. The first chunk of it was driven by finally getting around to hanging the paperback bookshelf. Once that was up, that meant we could unpack all the paperback books, which emptied out at least half a dozen boxes from the rather untidy mountain that’s been lurking in the guest room upstairs since we moved in. We also dragged the remaining two large bookshelves into the office, one on each side of the breakfast nook table (which is currently serving as our joint computer desk), and once those were in place, we could then rummage through the (slightly smaller) mountain of boxes and unpack a whole lot of office-related stuff. Granted, despite our best efforts, we still have not managed to unearth either the battery charger for our rechargable batteries, or the toaster, but we did manage to cut the mountain of boxes still waiting to be unpacked down to a much more managable number. Plus, dragging those shelves into the office has had the rather unexpected side effect of making the office actually look larger. I do not claim to understand how this works, but despite the fact that there are now more boxes scattered all over the floor of the office than there were when we began this little spate of organization on Friday evening, it looks and feels more spacious in there. Go figure.

The two dozen or so boxes that remain to unpack have now been stacked neatly in their respective categories (games, books, random crap we don’t know what to do with yet) along the walls of the guest room, leaving a huge expanse of floor visible in that room for the first time since we moved in. Amusingly, it took less than an hour for Rosemary to claim that room as her own, and she now spends quite a bit of time dragging half a dozen of her stuffed critters around the room in various configurations, or sprawled out on the carpet, ready to pounce on any other cat who might be silly enough to consider taking a nap there as well.