So what's new at the museum you ask?

Nothing dramatic.

We volunteers (the few, the proud, the underappreciated) continue to plug away at the renovation project. It''s one of those things where if we hired a contractor it could have been finished in a few days, but when it's dependent on volunteers it's taking all winter. One of the guys took care of spackling the numerous nail holes in the hallway as well as doing the taping and mudding where the drywall got cut and patched as part of cutting the opening for the new door. Yesterday the S.O. got one side of the hall painted and made a good start on the other. Sometime in the next 7 days he'll finish painting, and on Saturday, March 3, we'll get a large cabinet moved.

The cabinet we move, which is indeed substantial in size (5 feet wide and close to 7 feet tall), will be used to permanently house the museum's rocks and minerals collection. We've got a lot of rocks -- different types of iron ore, chunks of float copper, fossils from the local area  (which always surprises me; there's so much granite around here I don't expect to see chunks of limestone with obvious coral) -- but haven't displayed them in awhile. I am told that back before I started volunteering the museum did a rocks and mineral exhibit, but that was a decade or two ago. We're going to get the cabinet moved, one of the volunteers who actually knows something about rocks and minerals will make sure all the chunks of whatever are properly labeled, and if all goes well no one will ever to worry about them again except to maybe do some dusting.

After the cabinet is moved, we'll take advantage of it being gone to paint the drywall behind where it is now. Theoretically that section of drywall should be close to pristine (I can't picture that cabinet having done much dancing around in the museum before being placed where it is now), but you never know. Maybe the reason the cabinet is there is that at some point someone screwed up and punched a huge hole in the wall. The one sure thing with doing any project at the museum is that there's always an unpleasant surprise of some sort lurking in the wings.

The reason the hallway had a gazillion nail holes in the walls is there used to be a gazillion historic photos hanging there. Some of those photos will be going back up; others are going into a new display system. We are giving serious thought to putting up picture molding so we'll never have to put a hole in the wall again. As part of tweaking the hallway, we're also going to do one other thing that apparently got put on hold and forgotten: hanging the door for the file room. Not sure why that door never got hung when it's been sitting out in the storage building with all the hardware on it for years, but that's a pretty minor mystery compared with some of the stuff I've stumbled across in the past five years.