Fresh start

OK, I know everything slows down over the holidays but I haven't posted in a month and a half! I'm sure everyone has given up on my blog by now. However, even if I am the only one reading it, I am commiting to posting at least every other day because we are doing a lot of work on the house and I do want a record of it.

My last post left everyone hanging because we were just finishing the sheetrock on the wall in the office. We finished that before Thanksgiving so here are some finished pictures.
The finished wall with bookshelves built.

I realize that this probably doesn't look like much of an improvement to most people but the functionality of this room is improved 1000%. The closet that was here was full of mildew, you could only open about 2 feet of it at at time so you lost lots of useable space and couldn't see what you had in there, and the room felt very cave-like because of the big cabinet over the door. It feels huge in this room now. Also, we can actually see and store our homeschooling books efficiently, all my genealogy notebooks are readily accessible and we can store things like the dog food and coolers where they are out of the way but easy to grab.
Two problems left with this room
Problem #1-The floor

I realize this picture is very dark. You're looking at the shadow of where the closet was. The POs (previous owners) painted this floor black right before they put it on the market. It has the same good hardwood that the rest of the house has but they told us they didn't have time to refinish the floors and had seen this suggestion on HGTV. I actually like the look of the painted floor. Only problem is, our construction took it's toll on the finish and they hadn't painted inside the closet. I need to move everything out of here and repaint and repolyurethane the floor. Only one problem, this is computer central. If the kids' computers are out of operation for more than 15 minutes, their heads explode. Oh well, I'd like to get it done before we start another major project. I'll just have to be prepared to clean up their brains when I tell them the computers are out of commission for about 3 days. (Of course, I'll keep posting using Doug's laptop.)

Problem #2-The ceiling
Problem 2 will be dealt with tomorrow because I can't figure out how to get more into a post before Blogger decides my posts are two long. I really need to do some more research into using Blogger.