When the upstairs finally became available, we began moving items from the first floor and a few boxes from the storage units.

My new bedroom/studio was the first one to be fully ready for occupancy. It’s the smallest of the four, while the front two rooms were still being used by the carpenters as they worked on the front exterior. They still have some tweaks before coming into their intended use. The fourth, our guestroom, is at the moment mostly storage. This does seem to feel like musical chairs.

Still, things that had long been packed away have finally came out into daylight and become accessible. We’ve even had some more room to stir about in.

Not for long, though. The future dining room aka my former bedroom/studio was quickly designated as a staging area when we cleared out our storage unit at the other end of the state. In time, it will likely be a storage space when we get to renovating the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. Those Ikea kitchen cabinets, for one, will take up a lot of room somewhere before they go up on the wall. As for appliances? Or an extra sawhorse or two?

And we thought we were done with that sense of camping in this house?

Get ready for Phase Two, hopefully still in my lifetime.

You may have guessed we’ve taken tons of photos of the renovations in our historic home. You’ve been viewing some as progress reports in this weekly series, but those show steps along the way.

Sometimes it’s helpful to skip over those, going straight from how things looked at the beginning and then leaping to what the work delivered in the upstairs phase of renovations.

Should you be interested in that comparison, I’ve assembled a gallery of before-and-after contrasts in a free photo album, one I’m making available to you, should you be interested.

As I’ll explain next week, we’re hardly as far along as we had hoped. So I’m calling the album “Before & Midway After.”

In assembling the photographs, I was emotionally overrun in seeing how dramatic some of the advances have been. It’s helpful in facing the remaining work ahead.

~*~

That said, check out the free tour at Thistle Finch editions.

You’ll also find the history of the house and its previous residents in another booklet, should you be curious.