My Library

Well, I’m happy.
I haven’t been writing much in the last few months because my house has been a mess. Meg and I bought our house a year and a half ago. It included a front room with gloriously big sunny windows with front and side views. I immediately got it into my head that I wanted to write there, but we moved our computer office to one of our spare bedrooms.
Our second dog, Rosie, which we adopted last year was a horribly untrained brute and took it into her head that the front room was her personal indoor bathroom. The smell that resulted, despite all the carpet cleaning and enzyme products we could muster to put down on it, was nearly unbearable.
Last year I wanted a quiet place to write a book, so I installed our old kitchen table and borrowed my wife’s pink laptop to write my masterpiece. It worked fairly well, and despite the lingering smell, I wrote Hedera just about the time I joined Open Diary.


The Library as originally conceived
Earlier this year, Meg began to think about installing wood floors. Maybe she was watching the Home Improvement channel, maybe the idea evolved in her head. I’m not sure what sparked it. I immediately agreed with her, that the front room and the living room would look better with wood floors.
We battled back and forth about whether we should replace the tile floor in the kitchen with wood too. Meg said we should; I said we shouldn’t. I argued that it made more pragmatic sense to have tile in the kitchen, since the kitchen tends to have water spills and is easier to maintain on tile. She countered back that it’d look better to have the whole area be the same pretty wood.
It was actually one of our bigger arguments we’d had. After a while, I conceded that that she was right and I was wrong. I’ve got to learn to just concede on matters of taste when it comes to Meg; she’s got a stronger sense of style than I do, and she’s usually right.
Along came August, which is the most logical time of year to do labor-intensive projects, since it’s the hottest part of the desert summer months. Never mind that. Along came August and Meg and I started to shop for wood flooring. Well, I should say, wood laminate. It’s more within our budget, and it looks just about as nice. We found what we wanted at Home Depot, where they were also holding a sale on installation. Fantastic.
We shilled out $3,000 and made plans with Meg’s family to tear out the carpet from the library and the living room, and remove the tile from the kitchen. On a weekend in August, they all came over and we spent a sweaty Saturday and Sunday reducing half our house to concrete.
Home Depot gave us a call saying that the flooring was on back order and wouldn’t come in until September. Fine, we growled. Fine. Not much you can do when your floor is concrete but wait until the people you paid $3,000 to come do what they said they were going to do. Until then, I avoided the concrete half of the house. It smelled like dust, felt gritty, and we were limited on furniture.
At the end of August we got the call we wanted, that the flooring was in. It’s go time.We mustered the troops (i.e., convinced Meg’s brother to bring his truck), and picked up the flooring. It had to sit in our house for at least three days before being installed, since the humidity levels needed to balance out. Fine. So it sat stacked on our concrete floor for three days.

Library is reduced to concrete, flooring is stacked on it
And then, finally, the installer came over and did a brilliant job of laying down the flooring for us over a two-day span.
Meanwhile, Meg and I had purchased two bookshelves, a desk, a small couch, and a wooden bar, which we had arranged neatly in the garage. The weekend after the floor went down, we assembled all of it. I bought a lightweight computer and a monitor, which was always my plan, and finally our library is complete.
Well, except for maybe a rug, a computer chair, and some artwork on the wall. Meg’s thinking of adding a few reading chairs and a table to set down tea.
 
My new writing home


The Library bar and bookshelves
But for once in my life, I have a computer solely for the purpose of writing. No bills stacked up next to it, not crammed next to a shredder and file cabinets. Just a quiet place with lovely views to write to my heart’s content. Meg sometimes sits on the couch and reads on her iPad. Nearby I have bookshelves with my favorite books on writing, atheism, science, and my favorite fiction.
I think I write more often now.