99% complete.....

I'm typing this in our brand new office....or least brand new in terms of its flooring since the uncovered walls have 100 year old siding on them (the paint color is new) and the ceiling is 100 year old beaded board (but with a couple of new coats of paint)....anyway, I'm a happy camper!

The "old" office - you can't really see it here, but you stepped down four inches when you entered the room - my desk now sits where those chairs used to be. You can just glimpse the Roll Top desk shoved into a corner of the room because of its size...

I knew that raising the floor four inches would make a huge difference to this room, but I underestimated the actual impact it would have on the how we view the whole of the house now - despite this room being a closed in porch it now looks like it belongs in a way it never did before. Not to mention that the insulation that now is between the sub floor and the new floor has made a big difference in the temperature of my usually bare feet.

As usual, the project went longer than expected - and as usual there remain a few items to be completed - like the crown molding and the framing in of the window - but my fear that we wouldn't be loading in until a few days before the rush of Thanksgiving didn't happen...again, I'm a happy camper.

We "borrowed" a few pieces of furniture from other rooms in the house...like one of the matching Lazy Boys from the Living Room....the plan was to put Papa's chair in here but that chair was built for a large man to relax in - it is perfect for Dallas who is built much like Papa was - but not a very comfortable chair for a smaller person to sit in and read for hours on a rainy Sunday afternoon. So Papa's chair replaced the Lazy Boy in the Living Room and I now have a perfect reading corner....the photos that hang now on this wall were borrowed from the staircase photo wall - temporarily. (The new window displaced a lot of the photos that hung there - once its framed in on that side I'll replace the photos in these frames with genealogy photos and hang these back up on the staircase wall.)

These photos were taken with my cell phone because it has a wide angle feature that my digital doesn't - so the quality is not as good as I would like - please ignore the glare from the lamp...that sits on the vanity table mentioned in the next paragraph....focus instead on the how the floor is now the same level as the kitchen floor and how I now have a perfect reading corner.....the more observant among us might notice that the valance hasn't been hung back up in this window yet - that's because the rod "froze" during storage for reno and needs to be replaced - I'll get to it....eventually.

An old vanity table that used to sit beneath a window in the Living Room now serves as an end table for that Lazy Boy....it was supposed to be temporary until I could find an end table at one of the antique stores, but I like it much better in this room....so I think it will stay.

There are now three bookcases where there used to be only two....with Dallas and Nikki now out of the house, we had an extra upstairs in Hunter's room - shoved into a corner where it really wasn't needed and didn't do much for the look of his room - so I dry brushed it to more closely match the other two and placed it in the middle of that matching set....its shorter than the others which created the perfect spot to put some of my genealogy binders that are too deep for anything but a custom made bookcase as well as some of the Civil War and Revolutionary War books that we have collected through the years. It's also deeper than the others and allows for the smaller of my binders to reside in it (rather than the old handmade set of shelves that I used before).

Another cell phone camera shot - a bit dark but you get the idea......the desk is directly across from these bookcases....which have empty spots for the photo boxes and smaller photo albums and additional genealogy binders that I plan on purchasing over the next few weeks - the plan includes getting all the hundreds of family photos organized and out of the various bureaus they currently reside in all over the house - and to get the genealogy paperwork out of the two baskets you see in this shot.....that's the plan anyway....

Perhaps the best thing we did was put the Roll Top portion of the huge desk into the eave and simply use the bottom of it in this room. This old Roll Top is huge and was perfect for our old house with its soaring ceilings and open floor plan...but it never really fit in this office. Dallas will get it when he eventually has a house so in the meantime, I have to make it work. Using only the bottom half of it allowed us to place it against the window wall...which in turn allowed me to bring in that Lazy Boy and vanity table.....but most importantly allows me to see out the windows as I putter away at Genealogy or work the DNA project, write letters, pay bills or whatever else I have to do.....(I can't wait for the Camellia trees to bloom...but in the meantime, I enjoy the hummingbirds and cardinals that flit around just outside....)

Finally, a view out the windows of the fields....

The new furniture arrangement even allows for the return of the printer cabinet that has been upstairs serving as a bedside table since we moved in....freeing up my desk top from having to hold that printer.....

As I said...I am a happy camper. I love this room. Maybe I'll get back to blogging more regularly now....