House Update: Office and Theater Room

The office

Next comes two of my favorite rooms.  The office is where I spend most of my time, as it has the computer and my cards in it, and has been decorated in a sufficiently geeky manner.  (It's really the only room in the house I have complete control over.) :)  I like Star Wars, by the way.  The office is actually the biggest bedroom in the the house, but it made the most sense as the office - it was the only one that had a cable connection in it, and we didn't see ourselves ever using it as a bedroom.  There's a bit of unused space presently.

Theater room

As soon as we saw the family room downstairs, we knew what we wanted to do with it.  Thus, the theater room was born.  In January, we purchased a 60 inch Sharp LED TV, and hung in on the wall.  We bought a Blu-Ray player a little bit later (though I only have one Blu-Ray presently: the first Hobbit movie).  We also have our Wii plugged in here (playing MarioKart on this thing is pretty great fun).  We have since then bought a love seat, and moved part of our upstairs sectional couch downstairs, as the full sectional couch did not fit into the theater room.  Megan brought her large VHS movie collection, and we put up shelves and bought a DVD shelf.  We then put up several movie posters of some of our favorite movies.  So yeah, it's a pretty great room, if I do say so myself. :)

Theater room

The office

House Update: Closet and Library

Finished closet

The next project for the house was a closet remodel.  Our bedroom is next to the "library", and we've decided that it will never need to actually be used as a bedroom.  My wife came up with the idea of basically moving the closet from that bedroom, so that it is part of our bedroom instead.  We asked Jim from Vail Builders, the same guy who did our kitchen, what the cost of the closet project would be.  He quoted us at about $3300, a bit more than we were hoping for.  Thus, I used the experience gained when helping my brother Erik finish his basement, and took on the project myself.  Since materials totaled around $300, we saved about $3000 doing it ourselves.

Finished closet

I started this project slightly after being laid off in April, so I had lots of time on my hands to complete it.  It ended up being finished over a period of about 3 weeks.  It involved a few steps - creating the opening in the bedroom wall and installing the door, and creating a frame for the library wall, and finishing that wall.  After lots of cutting, spackling, and painting, the project was complete.  Certainly things are not as clean cut, straight, and pretty as if we had paid someone to do it, and imperfections abound, but we saved a lot of money on the project.  Side note: the closet door was a double in the library, and became a single in the bedroom, due to us not wanting to move around an electrical outlet.  It certainly could have been done, and probably very easily, but alas, it worked out.

Library - after

Library - before

The new closet became my closet, and all my clothes are now there, and my bureau was moved down to the spare bedroom.  The last part of the closet project was the setup of the inside - I bought and cut down several large shelves, and cut down the pole for hanging clothes.  It can certainly handle a lot more clothes than I own, but it works pretty well for me.  We then painted the bedroom grey, with a blue accent wall.  The library was then fitted with several large bookshelves.

It was a fun project, and gives us a little more room in the bedroom, plus more wall space in the library for bookshelves.

House Update: Kitchen

After - appliance garage and pull out drawer for bins

So, the first big thing we did on the house was have some work done on the kitchen in April.  We had a contractor (Vail Builders) push back the wall in the kitchen (reducing the size of the adjacent bedroom, the library), and add in additional kitchen cabinets on each side.  One side is the pantry - lots of wide, deep shelves.  The other size includes a pull out drawer for the trash and recycling bins, and an "appliance garage", along with some extra shelving.  It was an expensive project that took about four weeks to complete, but it certainly adds a bit of space to the kitchen, and that was one of Megan's complaints about the house.  It also added room for us to open our freezer door completely.  We then painted the kitchen red.

Before

After

After 

Pantry

Been A While

The day after my last blog post, I was laid off from my programmer position at Helgeson Enterprises in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.  I had been there for 11 months.  It had been, overall, a decent job, though I wasn't sure if I was going to want to stay there for all that long anyway, though it would have been nice to have another job lined up before leaving.

Thus begun my hunt for a new job.  I have gone nearly three months without finding something, but I'm sure something will work out.  All in God's timing, though I often wish he'd hurry himself up a little bit. :) Anyway, I've had several interviews, including at TCF Bank, Goodwill/Easter Seals, Dunwoody College, and LPS.  I felt pretty good about each of those, but nothing came from it.  TCF did have me back for a second interview, though, so that was good, even if they called me the day after to tell me they were passing.

I've gone nearly three weeks without an interview now, and I admit that I've started to get a little discouraged.  Something will certainly work out, and God is in control, and I usually don't just sit around thinking about it, but I've started to lose a bit of sleep over it, waking up in the middle of the night, wide awake, unable to go back to sleep.  It's silly, really.

At least I get unemployment - only about half of my normal salary, but it's still something.  Also, having all this time off has allowed me to do a bit of work on the house.  I will be (hopefully) posting several posts in the near future, showing some of the work I've done, and talking about the work we still have to do.

Having the time off has also granted me some time to work on writing.  I am currently working on a more detailed outline for The Anarchist Chronicles trilogy, and when I am pleased with that, I will begin writing book one.  Hopefully creating a detailed three-book outline will help the overall story.

I assume I will find another job at some point, though I sometimes wonder if this is God's way of telling me that I need to change things.  Maybe I need to focus more on writing.  I'm very tempted to submit my novel Queen of Men to literary agents very soon, to see if anything comes from that.  But we will see.  Other times, I wonder if this is a good time to go back to school and get my Masters degree, but that would possibly/probably require taking out additional school loans, which I'd prefer not to do.  Ah, who knows what the future holds.