The Disaster That Is My Study

For 11 years now, I've had designs on the northeast front corner room upstairs to someday become my study. Ever since I moved into the Roediger House, though, it has been a storage and junk room. No small number of boxes (dated 1987, after I graduated from college, or 1996, when I left my job as a middle school teacher to begin PhD studies at the University of Virginia) had moved from one place to another place to another place, without ever being unpacked. Some of those boxes were moved from my faculty apartment at Wake Forest University and deposited in this room upstairs when I bought the Roediger House in 2003.

When I left my position at WFU to become a full-time educational consultant, I had to put all my accumulated files and books somewhere, and that also all went into my study. Here's what it looked like this past Saturday:

Philip Lamachio of Estate Plaster is ready to put the Mearns brothers onto this, once they finish the last rooms downstairs. And I want Ricky and Nubee Sneed of Clemmons Flooring LLC to also get going on these floors and the mantle in there. So I had to get all this cleared out this past weekend before hitting the road for Virginia Beach for a week of work. I did it, but it wasn't easy:

It had to go somewhere so, even though I just got the Van Gogh guest room replastered and the floors and mantles refinished, it's now had to become a new and every-bit-as-disastrous storeroom:

Moving all that stuff did allow me to stumble across a number of things that had been tucked away, including a stack of undeliverable returned mail that I'd sent out to former 7th grade students at the time of their high school graduations. Fortunately, a number of those folks are now on Facebook so I ought to be able to track down addresses so I can send those out again! That oughta be a blast from the past, since it includes an essay about the importance of education that they wrote for me as one of their first 7th grade assignments.

Oh, and I also found this article from the Sanford Herald, published October 10, 1975: