facetofcathy

Last year, my father-in-law's eyesight went phooey and he was no longer an old man living very happily on his own in a house full of books, but an old man who couldn't see anything, couldn't read, couldn't cope. He's going to move into a flat down the road, but this is very much a work-in-progress.

This week he's staying with my in-laws (to give me a break), so we decided that this was a good time to deal with some of the books. Father-in-law was an avid reader, a collector and a lover of 2nd-hand bookshops. There were a lot of books. He's taken a small selection to keep, and asked us to depose of the rest.

An antiquarian bookseller from Chorley has taken a lot of them, and some have been sold to specialist dealers. The rest will go to Oxfam, but Oxfam do not want all the books all at once (limited storage space), so I am to store them in my attic and take a bag a week into the local Oxfam over the next 3 - 4 months.

So I spent Thursday clearing up and organising my attic. And then going to storage unit with brother-in-law, and unpacking crates, and finding boxes of books, and transporting boxes of books, and carrying boxes of books upstairs to the flat. The boxes are too heavy to carry up the ladder into the attic, so I had to unpack, haul books up the ladder in ikea bags, repack into boxes in the attic. (Brother-in-law gone home by this stage). About halfway through, I worked out that once a box was two-thirds empty I could lift it up on top of my head, balance it there with one hand and get it up the ladder that way. That helped.

Oddly satisfying day. Physical work, lifting things and moving things, which I just don't do very much. I ended the day in a very good mood.

(I also found that the attic has an infestation of carpet moths which may require professional aid. I carried a lot of carpet remnants & two chewed-up rugs down the ladder and out to the yard. I need to make a trip to the town dump sometime very soon.)