BBQ room pre-makeover

Saturday's cleaning out of the BBQ room proved one thing: We have a lot of stuff. A lifetime of collecting and a lifetime of never throwing anything away. And all of those books--some of which we've never read and probably never will.  And posters--lots of posters. Some of them are still kind of cool but some of them illustrate how much our tastes have changed over the years. And the funny thing is, our house is mostly windows. We have very little wall space to hang any art. We're thinking there may be a trip to Goodwill in our near future.

Oh, and the chairs. We have a lot of MCM chairs. They're not going to Goodwill.

So the stuff had to go somewhere. The artwork went into the master bedroom, most of it under the bed. The larger pieces are now being stored in the office behind the gym equipment.

We did learn something new, however, when we removed the original painting that hung above the bar. The painting is a scene of a high desert mesa landscape with a moonrise. When it came down we noticed a (burned out) light bulb behind the moon and a circular cutout of the canvas to accentuate the moon glow. We'll be rehanging the painting and we'll definitely be replacing the light bulb. Very cool.

The books made their way to the living room which made Zoya our cat very happy. Lots of new surfaces to lounge on! When the BBQ room is done, it will have built in shelves for the books and all of our Native American art (which is now occupying the tops of all our dressers in the master bedroom). There isn't a space in the main house, other than the bathroom, that isn't a temporary holding zone for things which will eventually make their way back to the BBQ room.

Everything else ended up in the garage. We were able to keep a path to the washer and dryer as well as the freezer, but barely.

Some of our friends are sad about us getting rid of the bar. We're not. It's going to be gently disassembled and will be moving up to its new home in Sonoma. Staying in the family. We think Mr. Tombleson would like that.

We did have a new idea as we were finishing up. Rather than fix the built-in barbecue, why not replace its innards with an electric infrared grill instead? It would be cleaner and more efficient. Now we have something new to research and shop for….

Mike says we're on target to having phase one done before Thanksgiving. Wouldn't that be nice.