Greenhouse Base Walls and 3000 Books

It's been a pretty busy few days over here. Scheduling the concrete truck for the stem walls of the greenhouse took a long time because the concrete plant was super busy because every other project had weather delays, but we finally got a slot on Monday afternoon.

Right around noon, the truck arrived and everybody got to work.

Concrete pump arrives

Pumped concrete goes pretty quickly and in no time at all the guys were putting the finishing touches on the walls.

Finishing the concrete

They stayed later doing a bit of site cleanup (there's a giant stack of dirt they agreed to move for me, and they got about half of it out of the way before dark). I didn't even have a chance to really look at it because I had to go back to my other project which is this:

The stack of boxes of books

On Friday the cross-country movers showed up with my mother's library, and I got to work. My goal was to unpack about one row of boxes a day all weekend, to get a bit of a head start on getting the living room back. I started around 5pm Friday, and worked until after eight. Then was back for whole days on Saturday and Sunday. I can't keep that up until it's done because of the whole having owning a business thing, but I did get more than half the books shelved and mostly sorted.

About 3/4 of the way through unpacking books

My mother has a massive collection of cookbooks, and a total library of over 3,000 volumes. In contrast, I have about 2,000 volumes in my library. So I've had a bit of work to do unpacking and sorting all these books onto the shelves. Because there's limited floor space -- we need to leave room to do things like get to the bathroom -- I've been putting the books onto the shelves and sorting them there, which is a little more book-moving work but less space-intensive. Once we get everything on shelves, there's the wonderful job of updating the library catalog to show the new location of each book.

And somewhere in there we get to start putting up the greenhouse, too.

posted by ayse on 11/16/21