NaNo Win! and the study is almost complete :)

So first we have this *points up*. There were times this month when I really didn't think I was going to finish. It was right down to the wire.

1. I had a really nasty cold, which, I kid you not, turned me into a zombie for about a week. I barely managed to write a couple of thousand words.
2. Last Thursday, just when I was trying to get back on track I fell over in the shower and bruised and jarred my left side which made sitting still and writing somewhat fun for 2 days.
3. My parents-in-law rang up and asked if they could come for the weekend. Don't get me wrong, they're lovely, but that meant most of the weekend was spent with family rather than deep in novel land.

Hence by Friday evening I was pretty sure I wasn't going to reach 50K and I almost gave up, but then I decided to give it one last go. It's funny, my stats on the site make it look as if I wrote almost 20K yesterday, but it was actually just that I was so disappointed that I might not finish I stopped filling it in until I was almost there :).

I'm pretty sure half the stuff I wrote yesterday is crap and is coming straight back out again or being heavily reworked, but at least it's in the machine :).

Well done to everyone else who finished too.

The Study

Our study is very nearly finished. The only things left to do are the hearth in front of the fire, for which we have all the bits, Rob just needs to work his magic, and half the door frame which had to be filled so didn't get painted at the same time as the other half.

This is a panoramic view of the end wall and the right side. You can see how it lays out, but unfortunately Rob's phone couldn't get the whole walls in :). Click to see it bigger.

This is of the end wall so you can see the cupboard, which was the final part we put in. We have always had a cupboard on that wall, but it was old fashioned and too shallow to be of any use, so we have extended it outwards using the same system as the shelves (they have an amazing catalogue).

This is what it looks like in daylight and looking at the end and left wall.

This is standing in front of the bookcase looking back at the doorway. That stylish picture on the wall came from Range - was £12.99 ;).

And finally for the room, this is the view of the corner along from the door. As you can see we need to put something on the walls :) It's the exercise corner.

Of course it wasn't quite complete so we also bought a rug and a bean bag chair (which is remarkably comfortable :)). We just need to get some anti-slip for the rug because it tends to move, although we could not have found a better size if we had custom ordered it.

All that was left was something for me to be able to reach the top shelves and Rob found these on eBay :)

The steps are made of yew and the frame is made of pine and they were hand made in the east end of London 40 years ago. They have been living in a dry cellar ever since. As you can see Rob has cleaned the top step just to see what colour it would come out, but the rest still need doing. I have tried them out and they are awesome - just high enough, but not too high so that unstable me can fall off and do some damage :).

This has now become my favourite room in the house. Book! :)

So who else has finished NaNo? How do you store you books these days?

D.I.Y. Update - Shelves with books!

So most of the books are in now. We have discovered we need to add another section of shelving for the big books, but that will have to go on the other side of the room near the door. We ran out of space :).

All of my art books and a significant number of history books do not yet have a home. You can see them stacked on the floor in this photo:

I have left the images large, so if you want to click on them all and judge me for my taste in books you can ;)

The paperbacks are all in sections and alphabetical, but the hardback and extra-large books in the two left hand sets of shelves are somewhat random.

In this piccie you can see the corner shelf properly too and Rob has kindly moved the ladder.

D.I.Y. update - New Shelves! :)

Do our new shelves are up. Can't compliment the company we bought them from enough:

• great service (we ordered them Thursday and they had them with us by Friday lunchtime even though their delivery date said Monday - we rang them up and asked nicely and they were so helpful and got everything done for us).
• Easy to assemble, we put ours up in a couple of hours
• Very stable and strong

Only down side - definitely not cheap. 

shelvingsystem.co.uk

This is our study as of last night:

We have been filling it with books since. I'll post another piccie when we've put everything in it :)

In case you are wondering that's 3m wide by 2.4m high. The shelves to the left of the picture are 30cm deep, the second bay is a 30-18cm transition and the last two are 18cm deep shelves. You can set the shelves anyway you want at 5cm intervals.

The right most set is for normal paperbacks, the middle for bigger paperbacks, the transition for all the hardback fiction and the 30cm for all the really big books.

NaNoWriMo - Update 4 and D.I.Y. Update

Sorry, I forgot to post NaNoWirmo Updates 1,2 and 3 here, but you can see them over at my Livejournal if you would like :).

As you can see from my graphic, my progress had been a little up and down. I am currently ~400wds behind thanks to my missed days (both the yellow ones were only about 200wrd days and red was none at all :)). However, I finally know who the murderer is! Yay!

For those who haven't seen my other updates, I was bemoaning the fact that I knew who all the players were in the novel, but I didn't know which one of them had committed the murder. For those who have seen nothing of me wittering on about NaNo at all, my novel is as follows:

Mirabel's Bad Day and Beyond (Working Title)

Miri, or Mirabel if you're her mother, is a very powerful witch. When she wakes up on an obnoxiously bright morning she knows it's going to be a bad day. First of all her familiar, Ran, has decided being a cat is no longer interesting enough and has taken to walking around as a naked young man. Not good for her equilibrium, not good at all. Then she bumps into a friend, Ed Hanson, she hasn't seen in five years and she starts feeling the witch's mating urge. Think hornier than Sid James in a Carry On film, only worse. Being a demisexual with few close friends, this is kind of new and confusing.

Oh and her next door neighbour has been murdered, which might be a problem.

The idea is growing as I write and changing a little bit, but the basic premise is still there :). The time line is different, but it's still a murder mystery and Miri is still a witch with something of a personal magical problem. I'm having a lot of fun with it as the universe evolves.

D.I.Y.

I helped lay underlay last night! I know, this might not be news for anyone else, but I am completely D.I.Y. incompetent and I actually managed to help Rob without messing anything up. In fact I actually came up with some sensible suggestions.

The flooring you can see in the picture isn't actually laid yet, it's just in place to make sure we didn't choose really badly and need to go and exchange all the packs we bought for something else :).

The underlay is actually thermal and you can see from the roll sitting to the top of the picture it looks quite space age when you can see the metal surface. We've laid 2/3rds of it, but we can't do the rest until we've put the floor down on the first part and can move the weights machine to where it will be in the room.

As you can see from this second picture, now we have taken out the old carpet and old lino that was on top of it, we actually have a rather nice old wooden floor. Unfortunately we learnt last time we uncovered one of the floors that they may look pretty, but they make for a very cold house.

The floors are open to the elements looking straight under the house and they have gaps between the boards. This means cold winds come straight in. Hence the thermal underlay and the laminate flooring to go on top :).

I'm not sure how we got this much stuff in the study in the first place

So anyone who's been to our house and seen our study knows it's the room where all the junk ends up. We have just emptied it so we can redecorate. We have filled 10 64L plastic boxes with memorabilia, craft stuff, tool and other random things. Most of these are going in the back bedroom where the boxes with lost of VHS tapes used to be (we dumped those earlier in the year).

What is going back in are the exercise machines, the books and the craft stuff and tools that are used more than once every five years. Then the plan is to add a sofa bed of some sort so the room can be used to house sleeping guests from time to time :).

We've taken the door off to give more space, but we'll be putting up a nice insulated curtain over the doorway like we have to our bedroom most of the time.

We have taken down all the current book shelves and we're buying some new ones - very sturdy ones. We are going to lay a new laminate floor (when I say we, that's a royal we, Rob's going to do that because I am totally incompetent at such things). We have already redecorated the walls and that's not a royal we, I helped with that. We spent most of yesterday doing it after spending Friday afternoon and Sat emptying it.

This is what our study looks like at the moment:

 

As you can see in the first picture we haven't done the skirting yet - that's going to be white rather than the half red, half green it is at the moment (most of it used to be hidden so we never actually finished painting it when we first decorated the room ;)). The second image is where all the book shelves used to be. The wall furthest from the window to the left of the picture is getting book shelves back, but the corner is remaining free of them.

This is what parts of the rest of our house look like at the moment:

The Old Dining Room

In the first picture you have the exercise bike and a whole stack of boxes and paperwork. This all came out of the large cabinets we had in the study which have now gone to the tip. Most of the paperwork is headed for the shredder (it's so old it's no longer required), but some of the boxes are going back in at some point. In the second picture you can see about a third of the books all stacked up, with games on top. They are all going back in. Then to the right of the image are some of those plastic boxes I mentioned - 2.5 of them are full of Avengers stuff :). They're all headed for the back bedroom.

The Lounge

As you can see the lounge is hosting most of the books at the moment.They all have to go back into the study once we have book cases. Luckily we don't have to deal with the hats in their boxes (the stripy things). Those are going back to my mother,

Oh and I'm going NaNoWrimo at the same time ... I think I may need my head examining ;). Amber (our kitty) is very unhappy with us at the moment - she dislikes change and all this moving of stuff is freaking her out somewhat. I am sure she will forgive us once she has a nice new sofa to make all her own.

We're trying to get it all finished before our annual Christmas party at the beginning of December, so we're running on a time limit. Once Rob has a 3rd of the floor laid we can order the bookshelves and I can start putting things back in while he works on that. If worst comes to the worst all the stuff will have to be piled up in there and sorted out afterwards :).

Anyone else decorating or have any decorating stories?