40 Bags - bags #31-35

The garage. I worked pretty hard in there today, and got about halfway through. Since I also did the Spring Spruce-Up in the yard today too, with some help from my boys, I am thoroughly worn out, and saving the other half of the garage for another day.

I got rid of several "outside" toys, a leaky cooler, some trash, and quite a few old paint cans. The "donate" box is already dropped off at the Goodwill, the trash is out on the curb waiting for trash day tomorrow, and the hazardous waste (partially-filled paint and polyurethane cans and some old fertilizer) is waiting patiently for me to find out where to take it.

I swept up a lot of leaves, pine needles, and dead bugs. June bugs, spiders, and mayflies. I definitely need to get a bug man.

Since I'm not done with the garage there aren't any pictures to show, so here's a look at a beautiful red daisy in one of my cleaned-out-and-freshly-mulched flower beds.

40 Bags - bag #30

Bag #30, can you believe it?

My closet, again. This is the "before" pic of the long shelf in my closet. It's not bad, in fact I would say that it is organized and tidy, but there are a lot of things in there that haven't seen the light of day in many, many years. It needs a good sorting through.

I was totally right about this stuff. After sorting through it I realized why it had remained boxed up for so long. There was very little of anything in this pile of mementos that I was happy to look at. Going through those things stirred up a lot of old feelings of failure, embarrassment, shame, grief, and sorrow.

I kept what few things I might someday want to honor by putting into a scrapbook, and pitched the rest. I don't feel better about it yet, but the stirred-up feelings are still fresh. I'll give it time, and then I know I'll feel better about unloading the remnants of a very unhappy time.

Things I tossed:

• yearbooks
• a few birthday/thank you cards from people I don't remember
• old journals full of crazy
• old pictures of unhappy times

Things I kept:

• Birthday cards, including one from my uncle while he was on his mission. He passed away over a year ago. It made me feel good to remember him. Another one was from a Junior Sunday School teacher that I don't remember, but in the card she said she would never forget me. I wonder if she did? I hope not, but in any case, I'm keeping the card. Another from my great-grandmother Amy - she wrote "To my Amy-girl." Another keeper.
• my first attempt at crochet.
• a book full of remembrances from Jason's funeral that includes a lock of his hair, and the tiny onesie he wore as a newborn.
• old school certificates and awards and pictures.

I suppose I might as well acknowledge that I have reached the age when anything from my childhood is old. Ah, well.
Here's the after pic. I think the two boxes of seasonal decorations from the spare room closet will eventually be moved to this space, since all the Christmas decorations already live in my closet. It makes sense to have all the decorations in one spot, right?

Shelves!

I got the shelves installed in the laundry closet today. They are much sturdier than I thought they would be; they are actually very strong and, I hope, durable.

I hope that over time I will get to the point where everything is organized, and convenient, and pretty. That will only come by actually using the closet and seeing what works and what doesn't. Some things I know already. For example, it's prettier to have all my cleaning rags in a basket, and it's more organized to have them all in a basket. But it's not convenient to have them in a basket. It's extra work to have to take a basket down and look through it to find the right size rag rather than just grabbing one off the shelf. And it's more convenient to put the clean rags away if they aren't in a basket. I have to balance my desire for a tidy and cute appearance with the necessity of making my work in the house as uncomplicated as possible. After all, my home is where I live and work.

I have one or two more "final touches" to add this space, but for now it's done!

Gone but not forgotten

Last night I got to the point where I had typed a really whole lot on a new post, but I was still writing it and not ready to publish it, and somehow I typed on the wrong button and my computer froze up. Somehow I had copied and pasted my monitor's wallpaper as part of my post which pushed Blogger over the edge. When I was able to get it back, the whole post except for the pic and one letter of the title were gone.

I still remember what I was talking about though, so you still get to read it. At some point, but not today.

First I'm going to whine a little bit. Here's what's wrong with me (and has been wrong with me all month!):

• It seems like everything lately has been hard.
• I can't think of anything that's gone smoothly.
• Hiccups and trouble at every turn.
• Small things that have bugged me for a while have all of a sudden turned into big things the moment I touch them.
• Like when I cleared the kids' oh-so-slow-draining bathtub drain of a big and very nasty clump of hair and lint then all of a sudden the tub stopped draining at all. It was then completely stopped up. There are 5 people who use that bathtub every day. It required a trip to the store very late at night to get some drain opener. You know Drano and Liquid Plumber don't really work, right? "Foaming Pipe Snake" sounds awesome, and on TV it looks like it scrubs out all the muck and gunk in the pipes and sends it and all the murky, dirty, disgusting water rushing down the pipes. But it doesn't. How do they get away with that?
  
• While I was in there in the kids' bathroom I noticed that the caulk around the kids' bathtub is mildewy again. So I got some Clorox spray that I had that is made especially for that and sprayed it all over. It did absolutely nothing about bleaching out the mildew. So I assumed I hadn't shaken the bottle sufficiently, shook it up some more, and sprayed it again. Waited awhile before going back to check. Nothing.
  
• How do these companies get away with charging $4 or 5 or 6 dollars for a bottle of something that doesn't do at all what you specifically buy it for?
  
• I've been working hard trying to get some improvements done in our home. They are slowly coming along which is nice. But then three "specialty" light bulbs have burned out in various light fixtures here this week. Each of which required a trip to the store on top of the other trips to get the one thing I didn't have to finish each particular project. I'm still probably at least two trips to Home Depot away from finishing my laundry closet. I'm spending more time driving back and forth to the store than I am actually working on the house.
• I trip over the pile of supplies and tools in the upstairs hallway at least 10 times a day.
• In order to put those things away properly I'm going to have to clean out the garage. Which I just dread doing, and haven't had time this week to do anyway.
  
• There have many small things like these make me wonder why I even bother trying.

I wonder why these things are bothering me so much. I know that I have much to be thankful for, and that small but aggravating things happen to everybody in life.

Maybe my lucky stars are out of whack or something. Maybe they'll get back in line and I'll have a month where things go smoothly and easily.

Hey! Wouldn't it be awesome if that month started today!

Home Repair

Or maybe "Home Renovation".

Or maybe just "Home Decor".

I don't know. Remember this post when I talked about reorganizing my laundry area? That picture is how my laundry closet used to look. Functional, organized, but not very cute. Or very interesting or fun or entertaining to stand in front of for hours while I wash, dry, and fold clothes. It was what I could manage at the time.

I started working on it last week and it is still in progress. Here's what it looks like now:
I took everything out, including the moldy old shelf (easy), and cleaned it out thoroughly and completely (harder than it sounds). Then repaired the wall (easy) and painted it this lovely, relaxing, soft blue/gray color (easy and fun). I'm taking a break for a couple of days because this process took much longer than I imagined it would, and now there are other, more pressing matters to attend to. All that's left for me to do is fasten the standards to the wall with screws (harder than it sounds), put up the shelves (easy), reorganize my supplies (fun), and decorate a little bit (harder than it sounds but fun).

Decorate the inside of a closet, you ask? Yes. The closet doors are open quite a bit and I stand for longish periods of time looking into this closet several times a week. I have some fun ideas for the decorating.

Stay tuned.

product review

Bar Keeper's Friend.

Of course I have heard of this and have seen it in the store. I've always thought it was regular cleanser like Comet or Ajax which is what I've always bought for scrubbing out sinks and tubs.

The other day on a blog I saw where a lady had scrubbed the silvery-gray marks off her stoneware dinner plates with this stuff and I immediately thought of this:

See that silvery-gray ring around the bottom of the bowl? That's where my Little Friend scrapes up with a spoon the last few molecules of oatmeal every morning. Over time that gray ring has appeared on all the bowls that he uses at breakfast.

I wondered if Bar Keeper's Friend would work on the stains. I thought it was probably the same kind of scrape mark that was on the blogger's plates. Today I bought some, and sprinkled it all around my white porcelain sink. There have been the same silvery-gray marks there from silverware, pots and pans, specifically my aluminum pizza pan that is too big to lay flat in the sink so it has always rubbed against the side of the sink when I've washed it. I scrubbed with a brush for a little while, not too strenuously, but giving it a good going-over. I have done this many, many times with Comet and it hasn't helped at all. Then I used the brush on the bowl.

The bowl and the sink are clean! I will work on the sink a few more times over the next week or so. Some of those marks are 15 or more years old, but it looks pretty great, and the yellow onion-skin stain from yesterday is gone too! It's hard to tell in the picture because of all the reflections and shadows in the sink but I'm very happy with how clean and new the sink looks.

Here's the bowl:
Bar Keeper's Friend is definitely not the same as Comet.

40 Bags - bags #27-29

I think we can agree that I didn't succeed with the "40 Bags in 40 Days" challenge. I didn't make it to 40 bags in 40 days but I am completely okay with that. The parameters of the challenge were created by someone else, and I'm willing to change it to suit my own needs and my own life. I'll get rid of 40 or 45 or 50 bags in however long it takes me to do it. I've seen some other de-cluttering challenges on the Internet that I thought were intriguing, but for now this is what I'm doing.

I am avoiding the garage where I am probably going to get the last 10-12 bags that I will be permitted to clean out. (Mr. Dub's closet remains off-limits to me. That's okay though.) The garage is dirty. It's overrun with daddy long legs spiders. It has things stored in it that will be more complicated to dispose of. It's a big, sweaty job. Right now in my life I need small, easy, cool jobs that won't take 2 or 3 showers to recover from. Jobs that I can finish quickly and feel productive, successful, and accomplished.

Today I tackled the "spare room" closet. It's not exactly "spare" right now because all the kids are living at home. My Pretty Girl has all her clothes hanging on the rods in the closet. On the floor of the closet are piles of kid stuff which will be sorted and removed from the house as the kids get out on their own. On the shelves, as you can see in the photo above, is a variety of things, some of which is here on purpose, some of which has been shoved/stuffed/crammed here. What I want for these closet shelves right now is storage, but organized and sensible storage.

I took everything on the shelves out of the closet and made a decision about every single item. Have you heard this quote by William Morris? "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." He was an interesting guy, William Morris was, and I would have liked to have had the chance to know him and understand him. Which is quite irrelevant to this topic.

So I decided, item by item, which things were useful or beautiful to me and got rid of the rest. Some items didn't belong in this closet and have been relocated to their proper place, and most of the things that are going out of the house are tired old holiday and home decor items. It's okay to get rid of things because I'm tired of looking at them or my taste/aesthetic has changed. I don't have to keep things just because I made them or because I've had them for a long time. Two bags are going to the trash and a box full of things that are still good is going to the Goodwill.

While I was going through everything I got to see my things again. I have some fun holiday decorations that I really like that I haven't used in years. Know why? Because it was too much of a hassle to climb over and dig out and then sift through the boxes it might be in. It has been so much easier to skip the whole ordeal than to try to find them and put it all out. I think that's sad.

I was reminded today that that is the point of the challenge. To make living in my home fun and enjoyable and peaceful by purging the excess and arranging what's left in a way that makes sense to me and helps me get to it quickly and easily. If decorating my home for a holiday makes me miserable and cross because of what I have to go through just to get the decorations out of the closet, it sort of defeats the purpose! I am a spontaneous person, and when I decide that right now while I'm waiting for something else to happen is the time to set out all the Easter decorations, I won't have time if I first have to unearth them from the closet. So it doesn't happen. For years it doesn't happen. Another thing I've realized while going through things is that sometimes I spend money because I am impulsive. It is a waste of money and space to buy and keep things that I don't love. I am still trying to figure out my relationship with money, spending, and shopping. Some of the things that I'm getting rid of today I bought because I was in a store with friends who were buying things, or it was on sale, or I was in the mood to spend or acquire. I'm trying to figure out why those situations make me temporarily lose my focus. What is it that I really want, anyway?

Here is the after photo:
In the box on the left are Valentine's Day and Easter decorations. In the middle is a box with the Fourth of July and Halloween/Fall/Thanksgiving decorations. Around the corner we have bottles of propane and a one-burner stove (in case of hurricane/emergency) and not in the picture but definitely on the shelf are some reference materials for Church. In my lofty plans, all of this stuff will belong somewhere else in the house when this room becomes a "spare bedroom" once again. Wouldn't it be awesome and amazing if I had an empty closet for guests to use when they stay? For the immediate future it will all stay here.

Here is the other side of this closet which is already organized and didn't need any sorting or rearranging. These things will move to another room when we rearrange bedrooms later this Spring: