Decluttering our home office … and building a baseboard

Yesterday I started the process of decluttering our home office. My first task was to clear the large pile of cardboard boxes that we had been saving ‘just in case’ we needed them, and these have now been collapsed and consigned to our recycling bin. This took longer than I expected, mainly because I had to carry everything down two flights of stairs from our second-floor office to the ground floor.

I also began to sort through my pile of magazine clippings and put them in files, a task that I expect will take me quite a long time. I took several breaks whilst I did this, and when I did, I disassembled the spare half of my pasting table so that I could glue and screw the hardboard top to the pinewood frame. The pasting board had been very made as cheaply as possible and was only held together by a number of metal staples. The corners of the frame were held together by unglued open mortise and tenon joints. By gluing and screwing the whole thing together I was able to make it much stronger. I also cut down two of the pasting table’s wooden legs to make cross-braces which I then glued in place.