Legwork and Life, week of 8/22/18

It was a really busy weekend, but a lot got done, at least.

Sleepwise, we swapped two doors in the house.  When we got the place, the master bedroom's door had this absurd "fancy" window in it, which was covered by pseudo-curtains.  This presumably was in fashion at... some point, but pragmatically speaking, the setup merely lets in light and makes the door extra heavy.  Since the presence of light makes me sleep more poorly, the door had to go.

So we swiped the downstairs bedroom door, and put that on the master bedroom's door frame.  And now the "fancy" door is on the guest bedroom, where it won't bother me nearly as much.  Chris also had the idea to lightproof the master bathroom door, which routinely lets in light in the mornings.  This was accomplished by weatherproofing it, actually...  Which is kind of weird, but as long as it works.

The bedroom is now so dark at night that even after I've woken up in the middle of the night, and my eyes are well adjusted to the dark, I literally can't see the bed or anything on the floor.  I just have to know roughly where they are based on memory.  This results in my groping around blindly in the dark while going to and from the bathroom.  But, I'm sleeping better, so I'll take that tradeoff.

Another home improvement that occurred was this:

We found this at a local furniture consignment store.  My spouse saw it, immediately flopped down on it, and declared it good.  We'd been looking for something exactly like this for months, but sectionals are both expensive and hard to come by in the secondhand market.  And darker ones, especially in neutral colors, tend to be even rarer beasts.  

So we bought it, and it basically completes our furniture downstairs.  We still need some kind of entertainment system, like a TV or a projector, for the corner, if we have to have a movie night or something.  But that should be distinctly less difficult to find.  There's actually a secondhand store that sells old computers and electronics, and they have a whole section that's literally just old projectors.  (They also have old TVs, natch.)  So we might look around in there and see what we find.  

Regardless, the progress cheered me up some, and I spent some time unpacking various media.  Books, DVDs, and video games all found their way to various points on the bookshelves we got a few months back.  The end result is that there are far fewer boxes downstairs, and even a few less upstairs as well.  The place still definitely doesn't count as "all unpacked," but it's much closer than it was.  

The extra clean floorspace is pleasant.  It's easier on the eyes to have uninterrupted carpet than boxes or scattered things here and there.  And it's also easier on my balance and mental energy, because I'm not having to navigate around and over those obstacles.  In addition, if things are put away logically, it's pleasant to be able to find things as I need them.   

I am not, I think, yet qualified to be a neat freak, and I probably never will be.  But it amuses me to think that my mother, 20 years ago, would probably be pleased with the kind of place I live in now.  Well, mostly pleased.  There's still boxes here and there.  But it's a lot more friendly of a place than my room was in those days.  I used to leave things all over the floor, such that you had to hop through "stepping stones" of empty floor in order to get anywhere.  

Ah, how times change.