It’s been a good week or two since we did any work on the house. Well past time to start a new project, wouldn’t you say?

The new project involves the office, and there’s a toilet/plumbing sidebar that is unrelated except for the fact that it involves spending money. The office project started with us being unhappy with the layout of our desks. They faced each other, which sounds cute but in practice was annoying and rather confining as we only had five-foot long desks to spread out all of our computer stuff and papers. We called Closet World (as they did the original work), and they drew up new plans that will have us at opposite ends of the office ensconced in our separate corners with lots of room on either side. While they were at it, we also decided to consolidate all of our file cabinets into one long row. Our file cabinets mark the last of the things we hadn’t joined – we each kept our own files and filing systems. We’ve been married long enough that we have determined it is time to merge our files. That’s how married we are now.

Then there was the electrical – Chuck likes a lot of light all the time and I prefer to work in semi-gloom. So we had an electrician come out and switch the controls so that we can control the lighting on each of our ends. And we decided to move the light switch from behind the door (a dumb place for it) to the other side of the door. Oh, and also move the plugs up a couple of feet and add a couple of new plugs. And in casse you were wondering, yes, this was all pretty expensive. How expensive? Well, let’s just say it ended up costing a lot more than the $1500 we were thinking it was going to cost. this is the money pit, after all. Silly of us to forget that.

So Closet World came out the other day and ripped off the countertops and moved all of the other bits around and will come back on April 24 to rebuild it all in the new configuration. The electricians are upstairs now doing their thing, and once they’re done we will need to repaint a good portion of the walls, and also patch some of the hardwood floor. Since we obviously can’t work in the office while all of this is going on, we have each removed to our separate corners for the duration. Chuck is in the smaller of our spare bedrooms and I am in the dining room. We spent a bit of time shouting up the stairs at each other until we remembered that the phone can do an intercom thing. Now we call each other.

The plumbing sidebar started with the front house, when one of the toilets up there wouldn’t flush. So out came the plumber with a massive snake that used mondo water pressure to clean the lines (we try to do this once a year or so as a preventative measure). This did nothing for the toilet up front, so today they came back and replaced the toilet. A good thing as that toilet was probably twenty years old. All is now well, and we are out $900 but now have clean pipes and happily flushing toilets.

I so love all of this that I am decamping to La Costa for a spa weekend, leaving Chuck to fend for himself amidst all of the dust and clutter.

Chuck took some photos of the office as it was torn up, that I will upload as soon as I figure out which camera he used.