The Secret Project -- One Week Later

Written Thursday, May 27:
This one's a secret because it affects the Wizard, who is out of town this week. He doesn't know we are doing this -- and by the time I actually publish this, he will probably have figured it out because he will have come home and opened his office door.

Yup, this week we decided to dismantle the Wizard's office.

It started out innocently enough. The previous owners of this house had animals and those animals occasionally did things they should not have done in odd corners of the "bonus" room, which we turned into an office for the Wizard. Our animals added to the undesirable things done to the carpets and, finally, I got tired of trying to clean up after them. So I wanted to rip up the worst part of the carpet in advance of our plan to replace the carpet in the fall.

I didn't take good "before" pictures because I thought this was going to be a smaller project. Trust me, the carpet was really ugly. You can get a glimpse of it here:

Anyone who knows the Wizard, however, will be more interested in the desk surface than in the carpet. We removed about 6 boxes of papers from the desk top before we started moving furniture around to pull up the carpet. We had to do this because, once we started pulling up the carpet, it was hard to know when to quit. Finally we decided that it all had to go:

Ugly carpet gave way to ugly sub-flooring.

And my nice, relatively neat bedroom that I spent so much time decrapifying not too terribly long ago? Well, it became full of boxes

and odds and ends of electronics, with optional cats:

and CDs and fans and all the other odd ends that had been stuck into the office to get them out of sight:

Even the lovely balcony got its share of stuff:

We are almost done now. Good thing, too, because the Wizard will be home tomorrow night. The bookshelf is back and re-filled. The CDs have been alphabetized and put into storage cabinets. The enormous mass of no-longer-used electronics have been put into one area for the Wizard to sort through. (Four non-working lap top computers? Really!?!) A new area rug is covering at least most of the ugly sub-flooring.

The six boxes of papers..... well, that's another story. We are going to take a look at them in the morning, but probably sorting through his papers will become the Wizard's Memorial Day weekend activity.

Update, Thursday, June 3:

The Wizard sort of figured out what we were doing, though not the extent of the project. There have been only minor complaints -- like we "lost" his electric screwdriver in one of the boxes. What his electric screwdriver was doing buried among the papers on his desk is a good question. And one that I doubt he has an answer for.

His office has since been taken over by Future Vet's summer project. But more on that later.