...crickets… tumbleweed… more crickets…

From this...

I’m a little ashamed that I haven’t been putting much up on the blog lately, but I have been rather busy… in fact up until a couple of days ago, pretty much all of my spare time had been soaked up in the puzzle cave – moving stuff around and adding cabinets, but let’s start at the beginning. 

...to this...

I was running out of space in the puzzle cave – most of the puzzles were actually in the cabinets, but you couldn’t see most of them as they were stacked three or four deep, and often on top of one another… it got that bad, that Gill and I actually had THE TALK about converting the garage or adding a second storey on top of the garage for a bigger puzzle room… in the end, common sense prevailed and we decided we just needed to make better use of the rooms we had -we didn’t REALLY need two permanent guest bedrooms – and there’s only two of us in the house so we should be able to cope… but that did kick off the mother of all re-jigs with new Ikea wardrobes in Gill’s dressing room, moving the desk out of the cave – which will henceforth be a purely puzzle cave, and then add a bunch of cabinets into said puzzle cave… 

...and this.

Except, simple as that sounds, it’s never going to be quite that easy… first we sorted out Gill’s dressing room and moved the spare beds in there… then the desk got disassembled, moved next door into the little spare room and reassembled – which left a bunch of spare wall space in the puzzle cave, so the new cabinets went in there, then I transferred six cabinets worth of puzzles from old to new cabinets, leaving them empty so I could dismantle them and put the white backing in them that I’d tried (and rather liked!) on the other half of the original cabinets… 

That was painful: taking down a perfectly good cabinet, stripping out the lighting, removing the back and covering it in white vinyl and then replacing the backing, the lighting, getting them back in place and then putting all the shelves back in and replacing the doors… 

…and then I got to spread the puzzles out a bit, so that you can actually see them on the shelves again… and I like the result… 

There’s still a bit more tidying up to be done, some need a bit more rearranging, but there should be some space for growth for a while now… he says…

I promise that I will also start writing about actual puzzles again shortly!