A few weeks ago, I blogged about the project I planned to work on when my husband went away on business.  Well, we did it!

Unbeknownst to my dear husband, I purchased a book cataloguing program, with the aim of cataloguing his books.  Now mind you, this wasn't a project I thought I could complete in odd hours, or in a day or so.  The dear man has 28 boxes of books on the porch, and assorted others scattered about the house in piles or on bookshelves.  I knew I needed lots of time and simple meals, and as much help as possible from the kids.  And I needed him to be away.  The opportunity presented itself...and we plotted and planned.

In addition to cataloguing the books, the goal was to clean the porch.  I shall post before and after photos--they do speak louder than words.

Before:
This was what the porch looked like on the day we started.

We moved about nine boxes a day off the porch into the living room, as well as the piles stacked on top.  I set about getting them into the computer program.  The children read ISBN numbers off the books that had them, and then I did searches for the ones that did not.  (I still have a small pile of books I couldn't find on any of the searches--I will probably have to enter those manually.)

We did nine boxes each day from Wednesday to Friday, plus piles.  I also did the books upstairs where his "office" corner is.  By Friday night, the books were all moved off the porch, and it looked like this:

The living and dining rooms looked like this:
And yes we do store books in diaper boxes!

On Saturday, I had to do the last couple of boxes of books, clean the porch, put everything back, and clean the  house, all before we had to pick up my husband at 8:00 pm that evening.  (There was a reason I needed to have simple meals--I spent nearly all my waking hours doing something with books.)

We accomplished our goal--at least mostly.  I still need to do the books on the shelves in the house.

Here are the after photos:
 
I was going to post one of a tired but satisfied wife, but just realized that Boo had crept into the photo under my arm.  Since I don't make a practice of posting photos of the kids, you don't get to see the one of me either, until at least, I can do some photo-editing.

It is lovely to be able to walk on the porch without tripping over something.  It is also nice because I rearranged the shelves so we are able to get one window open for air.  I could even fit a chair back there some afternoon if I need/want to hide.

And I think that my husband is pleased.   He didn't say much, but I do find him wandering around out there on a frequent basis now.