Time for an update.
(New) Office/Shack hasn't made much progress over the past couple of weeks because of an illness in the family. That's kept things up in the air enough that any spare time has been spent on just keeping up with the basics. It's piled high enough with "schtuff" to be sorted that it would be embarrassing to provide a photo.
Goal of the moment is to vacate MY stuff from old office downstairs. The wife has strong plans for that room, and I need to get my boxes o'stuff, two (empty, at least) file cabinets out, and two bookcases. The bookcases are mostly empty, but there's plenty of stuff in them that's keeping said stuff off the floor. The cool part is the bookcases are moving next door to old shack, where they'll be temporary archive for sorting out lots of old keepable magazines. If I only had an office about 25 x 25, I think I could fit all the things I want in it - workbench area, enough bookshelves, radio bench, office desk, general storage, etc. But I'm very happy to be in new office/shack on the main floor of the house and willing to live with(in) its limitations.
Today I spent time on the old shack, a small downstairs kind-of-a-bedroom (no closet) that I'll be keeping, but sharing with some "wife storage" ('nuff said). One of the biggest pieces of progress was that I routed the coax from the "temporary - of 3 years or so, tie-wrapped to the deck" 144/222/440 omni antenna that was routed in there into the basement, where it's only a few feet to get it into the office/shack. That will let me get at least some radios on the air while I work on the bigger picture of getting far more antennas in the air.
I touched stuff I'd completely forgotten about, and found the last few radio bits that I remembered I had but didn't know where.
The old shack will be where the electronics workbench will be and all the non-usable bits are now in the garage sale pile or I got up the courage to send them to electronics heaven at the recycler. I've got enough stuff going there for two or three trips - old Dish Network receivers, an old "slide tuner" television receiver that I thought might be mildly useful, our venerable Sony VHS VCR that lasted long enough not to owe me anything (replaced by a Sony combo VCR/DVDR), etc.
So... I just have to keep going until I have all the bits sorted, the unusable stuff purged, the "to be sorted" sorted, and finally get back on the air.
One embarrassing bit is that I own two rubber mallets, but can't find either one at the moment. I need it to disassemble a wire rack in old shack - no other tool really works for that, so I can either wait until I find one or both, or just invest $5-10 in a third one. Wish all my issues were that simple to solve.
73,
Steve N8GNJ