New projects, making progress

One of those things that we have always known will have to be done before we can sell this house -- and get out of Dodge -- is replace every scrap of carpeting in the house. We meant to start on this task last summer, which is one reason why we pulled up the carpet in the Wizard's office. But having gotten that far, we got distracted by kittens and by hosting a joint Bat Mitzvah celebration for two young women in our back yard. Somehow, adding household renovations to the mix just didn't seem worth it.

But now it's time for flooring. For a variety of reasons including cost and ease of clean-up, we decided to replace the carpets in most of the rooms with laminate flooring instead of more carpet. We are starting with three rooms -- the living room, the dining room, and Future Vet's bedroom -- also for a variety of reasons.

Of course, installing flooring means that everything in those three rooms has to be moved out. So right now, instead of emptying boxes, we are filling them up so that the bookshelves that seem to occupy every room of the house can be moved out of those three rooms. I started sorting the (mostly Jewish) books in the living room:

And Future Vet's sister-from-another-mother very kindly agreed to start packing up the shelves in his room:

Tomorrow morning, not only is someone coming in to measure the floors and give us a price for installing the laminate flooring, but also someone is coming to take a look at the kitchen ceiling and give us a price for fixing the holes and painting.

Just don't ask where all those boxes are going.