Today was actually a productive day for me. I went no where, which helped a lot, and just stayed home trying to actually get things done.
I managed to finish up all of the dishes so the kitchen isn’t looking too badly. Would have been nice if I would have done that two weeks ago, then I could have had a clean kitchen all of this time. But whatever, it isn’t like a single person, other than myself, has been to this house since Dominica and the girls left. So whatever.
I got the rest of the house Rug Doctored today. That was the hallway and both of the girls’ rooms. Neither of them was really dirty at all, even Liesl’s, but since I was doing the cleaning anyway and clean carpets do make for healthy rooms. The bleach in the cleaning fluid must kill a lot of things living in the carpets so I see it as a good thing no matter what. The process also forces me to get everything off of their floors and clean up their rooms – not a big deal for Luciana’s room but a decent undertaking for Liesl’s room – the toy disaster area. It probably took half an hour just to clean up Liesl’s floor. So I did a full pass of normal Rug Doctor cleaning, including a quick pass into the entry of Dominica and my room which sees the most traffic, and then a full pass of just hot water to rinse afterwards. Most people skip rinsing and that really makes a difference for getting the carpets clean.
I watched Tomorrow Never Dies this afternoon and put in The World is Not Enough but never finished it, I never even made it very far into it.
I got super productive this evening and went out into the garage and worked like crazy. I got several loads of things moved up to the attic, threw out a lot of stuff and got some stuff sorted and moved into the house, like two additional boxes of books, which were hiding in the garage. I can’t believe that more books were hiding out there. The number of books in this house is just crazy.
Going through the garage and attic is always very sobering. Whether it is realizing all of the stuff that we own that we never, ever use or have any need to have purchased or finding things like a large box containing nothing except for Oreo’s old bedding or finding his original blood work that we had done in 2006 when we were trying to find the source of his seizures. I did find a lot of things that were just “missing” like movies that we had been looking for. The garage has become such a mess that we are really losing things in it. We just don’t have enough space for our garage to become a pile of stuff. I had to resort to moving things like our back porch screen door and two strollers into the attic. That stuff can go six months to a year or more without being needed and having it in the way all of the time just doesn’t work. And, with the strollers, as Liesl gets older there is less and less chance that she will ever need to use a stroller again and Luciana almost never uses one as it is. So having a single stroller as well as a double stroller taking up valuable garage space doesn’t work out well as they take a lot of garage space.
I found one entire bin just of Dominica’s Vera Bradley purses and bags. She needs to figure out where these things are going to go. Storing them in bins to find a decade later seems like a bad idea.
There are bins of sweaters and coats and all kinds of weird things in the garage. I found two bins of kitchen supplies and two more of just glass and stemware.
By the time that I was done I would guess that easily half of the garage floor space had been cleared. Whether by emptying boxes, throwing things out, moving stuff to the attic or just consolidating onto shelves the garage is now usable and you can move around and look for things that you need. What a relief. The mess in the garage has been driving me crazy for a long time. Now I need to get inside and focus on my office again which I managed to get cleaned up and then had explode again as I tore apart the bins and drawers that I have in there.
I have the shelf in Dominica and my bedroom closet cleared off now too. We could theoretically actually use that for storage now. Now to decide what goes up there.
We need to install a shelf into Luciana’s room that will hold the Lego Harry Potter sets that Dominica is building for her to display in there. That will help a bit as there are Lego boxes and sets sitting on the buffet behind Dominica’s desk making it impossible to use that space in any way.
I stayed up way too late cleaning and writing stuff on Spiceworks. I have done an immense amount of work cleaning up threads in there this week. Normally there are around two hundred and ten pages of unresolved threads and I have that down to about one hundred and forty three at the moment. That is something that I have never seen before.
It was actually after four in the morning when I finally got off to bed. I was energized from all of the work that I was getting done in the garage and I just did not want to stop. So I kept going and going. The house is still a huge disaster but Dominica should be happy with the fact that it is a mess because so much work that desperately needed to be done is getting done. Once she is here and able to help me go through boxes together and determine what is actually needed and what is not it will be that much better. Now that there is space to actually work on things we should be able to rocket through a lot of this stuff. And she can help left things for me so that I can move them up to the attic as well.
I am in the office tomorrow for New Year’s Eve. I will be home on Tuesday as it is a holiday. Dominica and the girls will be driving on on New Year’s as Dominica needs to work in town on the second and will be staying home with the girls that day.