Lorelei carried out her threat and emptied out the office and NJS Family History Archive. It took us together over a week to clean up and reorganise. Here are the before photos:

Despite my general untidiness, I do have an OCD streak! For some time, I have been playing around with LibraryThing – a computer program for small libraries – and had catalogued about 175 books. A further 150 books have now been catalogued and all have been labelled according to the Dewey Decimal system. This is just the office library!

Out in the lounge room, there is another collection of non-fiction including biographies, and Chinese, political and military histories to be added over time. This will cause some physical shift in book location. LibraryThing also catalogues by ‘tag’ as well as by author, title, and number. The program works very well, so finding books is quite easy. I have also recorded some e-books and digital articles held in the computer files.

For a book and magazine hoarder, I made the difficult decision to ditch a huge quantity of family history magazines. Having a complete collection of the Australian publication Inside History, I kept that along with Traces, to which I currently subscribe, as well as Who Do You Think You Are. Putting feng shui principles into place, turning the desk around did cost some space and also meant there was sunlight glare on the monitors necessitating new curtains.

The end result is pretty good and one of which Lorelei is also justly proud. After two weeks of working in the new space, it remains tidy with everything in its place! “One day” – when the deck is built, the office/study can extend there and become truly luxurious. Now for the photo archive!

The after photos: