Missives from the 6th Floor

My sister's coming to stay with us in September, and while the theory is it'll only be for a "relatively short time" Dawnise is the sort of sister-in-law who really wants to make things as comfortable as she possibly can. (That's right Laurie - I'd let you sleep in the basement, so direct all your thanks to Nise ;)

We started thinking about how we might reorganize bits of the house to make it more accommodating for guests. In the last house, the library doubled as a guest room, but in this house, while the "library" on the ground floor is ok with an aerobed for a week or so, it doesn't really seem like a good medium-term solution.

After playing with the aforementioned "home organization kit," our current thinking is to relocate the office into what's currently the "underutilized" game room, move the games into the room off the entry that's currently the library, move the library into the current office, and bob's your uncle.

The up-sides to this plan are:

1. we don't have to move Dawnise's sewing room
2. the resulting library is on the same floor as the secondary (full) bath, making it a bit more convenient for guests
3. we don't have to move Dawnise's sewing room
4. it seems like it might better utilize the game room, which is currently sorta just there, and not frequently used for much of anything.
5. the only bit of furniture that gets displaced in this scheme is the MAME cabinet, which I'd been considering getting rid of for a while now (I haven't turned it on in this house). Getting that beast down the stairs into the garage/basement is going to be a pain in the arse, but aside from that, most of the items being moved are doable by the two of us.
6. we don't have to move Dawnise's sewing room

The downsides to the plan are that Dawnise's sewing room might be slightly better for a guest room, as the office-cum-library doesn't have much of a closet, and is "right next door" to the master bedroom, so there's not as much privacy for either party as there might be.

Oh, and the high speed internet drop is in the office (very intentionally) - which also happens to be a nicely central spot for the wireless router. I'm currently using 85Mbps ethernet-over-powerline adapters to get network to the entertainment center, so I grabbed the spare I have and gave it a try in the proposed office. It linked up immediately, and dsl speed test said I still got over 10Mbps out to the inter-pipes.

While that sounds promising, it's not clear how good (or bad) access from the wireless net to "critical" wired devices (like the NAS) would be over that connection, but I really end up needing to, there's a coax outlet in the proposed room and I suspect I could convince Comcast (which is to say, pay them) to come out and "light up" that jack.