This photo, from Jan. 5, shows two things: how far I’ve come in painting the office (most of the south wall), and how empty our bookshelf is now that we got rid of 70+ books.

Looking back on life, I think most of my days were simply days. I ate, slept, went about my business. Growing up, my favorite days were the ones that included a lot of outdoor playtime and/or being with people I didn’t get to be with very often — usually cousins, or going places that I didn’t get to go very often — our family’s long road trips, for example.

These days, my favorite days fall into three categories: (1) When I get a lot accomplished, (2) When I have plenty of enjoyable outdoor playtime with the children, and (3) When I take mini-road trips alone. But still, I think, most days are just days — wake up, coffee, chores, eat, more coffee, get kids off bus, eat supper, clean up, watch Netflix with wife, and go to bed.

I’m trying to change the ratio. I want more days to be my favorite days. Is this possible? I don’t know.

Yesterday was a very productive day: much was accomplished.

I took clothes and some books to GoodWill. I took even more books to Half-Price Books in Round Rock, getting paid a few dollars for them. (In all, more than 70 books left our home on this day.) While in the book store, I found two books from my want-to-read list and one classic book I’ve never read, and I bought them.

Passing by Ikea on the way home, I stopped in and bought a new drying rack — because lately I’ve been air-drying lots of clothes inside instead of running the dryer and it’s saving us money, but I keep running out of room on the existing rack. While in there, I took the plunge and bought two “Josef” metal cabinets for only $40 each. I’d been hem-hawing for months about what to buy for storing my camera gear and I was getting tired of it.

When I got home, I still managed to read for an hour before the school bus arrived. When my son got home, he helped me remove all the ornaments from the Christmas tree and store them. Then I took down the tree and put it in its box. While the boy played with Legos, I assembled the two Josef lockers and put them in the master bedroom.

After the wife and daughter got home and we ate supper, I moved my camera gear into the Josef lockers (almost all of it fit), which left empty cabinets in the bottom of our entertainment center. Into those, we moved the remainder of our books, which had been the plan all along — so we can get rid of my 22-year-old particle board Walmart bookshelf (see image at top), because we need the space.

The northwest corner of our master bedroom. The white rectangle at left is the outlet with USB ports, for charging mobile devices, and the brown cabinet next to it is our “charging station” — each drawer is for a different device and its charging cable(s). Then there are the two Josef lockers with my camera gear in them, next to my night stand. Click here to see a larger version.

Here are the two new cabinets after I installed (most of) my camera gear. Each came with two shelves, but I put all four in the left cabinet. In case it’s not clear: top left is my camera, flash trigger, and a flash; below that are lenses, extra flashes behind them; bottom three shelves hold battery chargers, spare batteries, umbrella swivels, remote controls, extra flash triggers, and tiny DIY parts. The right cabinet houses light stands, umbrellas, tripods, and — stuck to the inside of the door — my MagMod (magnetic) light modifiers. Click here to see a larger version.

See, I want more days like this — not necessarily days where I have to drive to Round Rock and spend $100+ on miscellaneous items, but days in which I get stuff done besides day-to-day chores. Maybe the only way to do it is if I compress more of my weekly chores into just a couple or three days. I don’t know. Maybe if I have more “favorite days” then they won’t seem so special.

Anyway, the next step is hauling off the old futon, which I’ve now had for 19 or more years — one of the few items that predates our marriage. Right now it’s in the floor of our master closet. It’s been very useful over the years but now we want it gone. I think I will do that tomorrow. Once that’s done, my wife and I hope to go through that closet with Marie Kondo’s method (see previous entry) and see what in there “sparks joy” or needs to be thanked and removed. Then I will move filing cabinets in there, and a few other things from the office — because it needs to be our son’s bedroom some time this year.

While I certainly still believe my wife and I did the right thing by buying the smallest, least expensive house in this neighborhood, I also now definitely understand why people buy houses with an extra bedroom or a dedicated study/office. Because half of the moving around we’re doing is only to get space to put something else we already have. Most of the stuff in the office couldn’t be moved somewhere else until something else was moved first, and so on.

This is why our next house will have that extra room.

On the other hand, if we do buy that house with the extra room, but then both our kids go to college and never come back (the plan), then we’ll have three extra rooms and nobody wants to clean all those.