We’ve been talking for a while about reshuffling the rooms in the house to give Adrian a room of his own. He’s had a corner of the living room for his stuff, and his bed is in our bedroom. (Luckily he is a very heavy sleeper.)

The kitchen remodeling forced us to move things around anyway, and made Adrian’s corner disappear. So while his things are all packed away, we’re seizing the opportunity and making this happen.

Adrian will get the room that used to be Ingrid’s. Ingrid will get the room that used to be ours. And we will move down into what used to be the office/library.

It’s a chain of moves, and obviously it has to start in the other end. Can’t move things into a room that is already full!

The first step was to move the entertainment station out of the office. We used to watch movies on Eric’s computer and its large monitor. When he bought a PlayStation, he hooked it up to the same monitor. So his workstation was also everybody’s entertainment station. Now we have a TV for movies and games, and the TV and its sofa are installed in Adrian’s old corner.

The next thing we have to move out of the office/library is all the books, and Eric’s desk. We spent much of today packing books in boxes. (Can’t put them in their new place yet because we need to keep the living room and kitchen mostly empty, for when the builders come back to finish the kitchen floor.)

Most books went into boxes which we took down to the basement. Some ended up in paper bags instead, ready to be taken to a charity shop. And some definitely go straight into the recycling bag. Not even a charity shop will want The NHS guide to pregnancy and childbirth, or a 1990s English-Estonian dictionary of business and economics.

Between these lies the street atlas section of an old phone catalog, probably from around the time when we moved here. We got phone books delivered to the house for the first few years. The phone book parts we threw out, but the street maps (with their characteristic red edges) were useful, back in the days before we all had smartphones. This one I’ve even reinforced to lengthen its life. I remember cycling with it in the basket of my bike, with little sticky tabs to mark the page I was currently on.