Over the spring and summer, we tried to sell our house, but it didn’t work out. We’re still not sure why. We’ve fixed up a bunch of things since we bought the house, and the place really is quite pleasant (we’re trying to get a jump on moving school districts before high school). Anyway, it didn’t work out, and the new plan is to stay for a little longer. The remaining carpet was original to the house and pretty gross, so we’ve replaced that (we had previously installed nice wood and tile elsewhere in the house). We also decided to make the bonus room more useful. We had hidden most of our books in storage and gotten rid of the rickety old book shelves we’ve been carrying around for years, but now that we’re staying, we need space for our books, which I’ve really missed for the past few months. So we had a carpenter build in some cabinets and bookcases for us, with bonus window seats in the dormer windows for extra storage. Our daughter is especially delighted by the prospect of curling up with a book in one of the window seats. Here’s what the process looked like, and the final product. Now we need only to get the rest of our books out of storage and the room will be quite lovely.

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