daisy_knotwise's that I don't know what to do with into a grocery bag (which should give you the clue that it really wasn't that much stuff), I can now see wood on the main area of the desk, where I've pulled out the furniture polish and wiped off several years accumulation of dust. Gretchen put up wards to keep the cleaning lady out of this room, so even had the desk been clean enough to dust, she wouldn't have been doing it. The wards were largely due to the condition of the floor, which Gretchen's been working on recently and which I've now filled up with two boxes of stuff from work that still need to be unpacked -- somehow!A chunk of the files in the lateral file are going to go to the filing cabinets in the basement. That'll make it possible to file away a bunch of other stuff that came from work. Books are another problem altogether, so we went back to Classic Oak Designs where I bought the desk and large bookcase a few years ago to see about getting a matching bookcase to go in the spot near the door that used to be occupied by the really big color laser printer that we gave to
samwinolj on indefinite loan when we bought the all-in-one color laser.There was only one little problem. The company that made the desk had gone out of business. So I've ordered a maple bookcase in a similar style and finish which, in my opinion, will be quite good enough.
Now I'm going to install the new bookshelf stereo system that I picked up yesterday at Sam's Club to replace the full-sized system that had been on top of the lateral file. The all-in-one printer is there now, which freed up a good amount of space on the return. That space is now occupied by the assorted bits of networking and telephone hardware, much of which had been on the top of the old, flaky computer that sat off the end of the return and is now about to be exiled to the basement.
I also removed all the cassette tape storage units from the shelf in Katie's closet (along with Gretchen's mom's good silver, which I've handed off to her to figure out where better to store it), filled them with the assorted cassettes that I found in the first pass across the top of the desk -- six more turned up in lower strata later -- and hauled them down to a shelf in the basement.
The basement is getting very full.
So is the recycling bin which is still sitting by the curb, because they didn't empty it completely when they picked up the trash yesterday. I called to complain and was told they'd send someone.
Of course, they didn't. Their voice mail got a blistering call right after they closed today. If I don't hear from them on Monday, they'll get another in person.
I tire of the "tell them we'll fix it, but do nothing" school of customer service. :)