Oz room update

It has been a very long time since we looked in on the progress of my Oz room, and it's high time I did something about it. So, here it is:

Oh, dear. It's empty! Where did everything go?

For those who may have been wondering about how quiet this blog has been of late, and some of the mysterious notes about changes in my life, it's time to let the cat out of the bag and tell you. This summer I accepted a new job in another part of the state, which meant moving almost two hundred miles away from our old place. This is probably a good move for both of us, but it has also meant that most of our summer was taken up with house hunting, packing, and all that good stuff that goes with such a big life change. But we're mostly in now. All we have to do is unload all of these boxes and find a place for everything. The good news is, I get a new Oz room. Here's a peek at what it looked like before anything came in:



So yes, I get to start all over again. This room is possibly a little smaller, but I think I can configure it a little better, as it doesn't have heat vents on the walls. It also has more outlets, which should allow for a little more flexibility in putting in electronics. It also has only one window (facing west, which is not ideal, but this house doesn't have any north facing windows), which gives me a little more wall space to play with. I also have more closet space for storing toys and games, and maybe even all of my Oz t-shirts. Yes, I'll blog about it more. First order of business is going to arrange the furniture just right, then make sure I can find all of my Oz boxes and get them in here. Then the real fun begins...

Room clean-up update

It's been, what, two, three weeks since I announced I was cleaning up my room and turning it into an Oz room, right? So, it's time for an update. First, looking toward the worst of the mess:

Okay, this doesn't look much different, but trust me, it is. The floor is clear, at least from this point of view. (Around the corner, however, is another story, but I haven't quite gotten to that yet.) But here's where most of the work has been going on, facing the other way:



My desk is now cleared off, and the top two shelves of that bookcase are now full of reference books. The top shelf is general stuff about Baum, the books, some exhibit and auction catalogs, and even two books about Fred Stone, the actor who played the Scarecrow in the 1902 stage play version of The Wizard of Oz. The second shelf is entirely devoted to the MGM movie, including three biographies of Judy Garland (a fourth goes up there once I'm done reading it.) The lower four shelves are holding a lot of non-Oz things right now, but I suspect some of that will eventually stay there, particularly computer supplies. On the wall is the set of Oz figurines that a friend gave to me, and over on the left you can just see the wedding present that an artist friend/fellow Oz fan made for Laura and me. It's hung in our living room ever since we moved here, but I think the lighting in my room shows it off better.

I've made some real progress already, but I still have that whole mess on the floor you can't quite see yet, a set of shelves to put into one of the bookcases and the doors to hang, and lots of non-Oz things (comic books and teaching materials, mostly) to figure out what to do with. But the overall shape of things is coming along, and I can start dealing with the little fiddly bits later. So it's looking good and doable, but I suspect it may get a bit cramped in here by the time I'm done.

My latest Oz project - and you can watch!

The time has come. I've bitten the bullet, and I'm going to do it. One reason we bought this house was so that Laura and I could each have our own little hobby rooms. I moved much of my stuff in, of course, but over the years the actual use I've gotten out of it has ebbed and waned as stuff moved around, got stored in there, etc. Well now we're both going to make an effort to clear out a lot of the clutter in this house. I've already moved a lot of extra stuff out of what I hope will become my Oz room, and even moved in my desk and computer, so I've been doing more stuff in here already. And I have a deadline to keep me going. My Oz friends are coming over for an Oogaboo Rendezvous on April 16, so I want to have it all done by then so they can all see it. Toward that end, I want to document my progress. So here's how most of it stands right now:

Quite a pile, huh? Off to the right, you can see the highlight of my collection. It's a lawyer bookcase that my parents bought for us as a wedding present, and I keep the bulk of my most important Oz books in it. That I won't need to touch, at least for now, but once I get digging through my stuff a bit more, I want to put my books by Eloise Jarvis McGraw in the bottom shelf. Off in the corner is a set of shelves with boxes. Those are most of the rest of my collection, and they're all the books I've inventoried over the past decade or so. At least I have a decent idea where any one book is, thanks to that inventory. Everything else is just stuff I have to figure out a place to put it. As you can guess, this is not going to be easy.

But here's where I will probably start:



This is looking the other way. The clutter in the picture above is behind me. That bookcase? That's a big reason I'm doing this now. My parents recently moved, and they offered to give me three cases like this. I jumped at the opportunity, hoping it would give me the incentive I needed to get going on this project. This one I put up by my desk (the stuff in the lower left corner of this picture is on the desk). Once I got this up, it gave me a place to shove stuff and get it out of the way while I moved in the other two bookcases. They are now on the wall behind me, back-to-back forming a peninsula. Yes, I've screwed them to each other and earthquake strapped them to the wall, so they should be pretty stable now. (By the way, you can see two of the doors just to the left of the case in the picture above. Yes, it's so crammed in here right now that I couldn't hang those doors.) So anyway, to make a long story short ("Too late!"), I want to clear out and organize the bookcase by my desk as a place to keep non-fiction and other reference works so they're easily accessible. I had many in the lawyer case, but the fiction collection just kept growing so much that they got shoved out. Besides, this way I can have more stuff within reach. So, I'm going to start with this case and clearing out my desk, since some of the stuff in there I think I've had since middle school! I will try to give you updates and let you know how it's going, and I also hope to show you all the final results soon. Wish me luck!

Oh, and while I'm here, let me just brag about my latest Oz acquisition. It's a Disney DVD, Your Host, Walt Disney. It's a collection of episodes of Walt's television show, and a few other goodies. The reason I got it? It includes "The Fourth Anniversary Show," where the Mousketeers encourage Walt to make a movie of the Oz books, and to let them star in it. However, The Rainbow Road to Oz never got much further than the sketches on this show, but at least we get a glimpse. There's also a look behind the scenes at another Disney film (one that did get made), Babes in Toyland, starring Ray Bolger. The rest of it looks pretty good, too.