TandemHearts

While in Washington, D.C. around Christmas, we visited the National Geographic HQ where they had a display of (live) geckos.  Terribly cute for a bunch of lizards.

On a more somber note, we also visited some of the war memorials on The Mall.

Go to Maine – get snow.  We were in Maine for Christmas and got caught by the big blizzard.  When on vacation we try very hard to go with the flow, so instead of stressing over cancelled flights, we looked at the storm as an opportunity to spend a couple of more days with family.

One of the nice parts of living in a community built by a developer is that most houses have the same tree in the front yard – really. Most of the year this doesn’t matter, but in the Spring all the trees bloom at the same time.  Well, almost at the same time. Because of the micro climates, the houses on the south side start blooming about 1 week earlier than the trees on our street. None the less, they all look fabulous right now.







After almost two decades in the house, some rooms still need improvement in layout or organization.  Most of the house is nicely decorated and functional, but two rooms – the office and the exercise room – needed some attention.  Neither room is big, roughly 12′ x 11′ each, and each is filled with lots of stuff.  The exercise room has 3 bicycles, a fan, a TV, bookcase, a desk, etc.  It had become hard just to move around the room. Fixing that room was easy. We just pulled out the bookcase , sold the desk and moved some things around. Easy peasey and it didn’t cost anything.  It made fixing the office seem like a good idea.

The office was even more crowded. A large computer hutch dominated the room, with the rest of the available spaces consumed by a corner desk,a storage cabinet, a bookcase, 2 printers,  etc, etc, etc.  We could work in the room, but it felt cramped and there was never enough storage for all the things that accumulate in an office.

We tossed around a few ideas and decided that we like clear flat surfaces and need lot of storage for small items. We picked up some 8 foot wood counters (Lagan) from Ikea. We mounted one to the wall, so it looks like it’s floating.  Once we realized that we really needed storage, we settled on a combination of classic metal filing cabinets and some nifty counter top drawer units that have 5, 8 and 10 drawers.  This works out well for stashing small collections of things. Now the hard part is remembering what is in each drawer until we get the labels on them.

It took two solid weekends and a lot of time after work to empty the room, buy the new stuff, and arrange the new bits. Each piece of the armoire weighs close to 200 lbs and just barely fit through the door to get it out of the room.  That’s headed for craig’s list and I hope whoever buys it brings a couple of big friends to move it.

Here is what we started with.  Click on the image to see what we ended up with.