During the past week, I managed to finish the following tasks:
Saturday. I scraped the ceiling in the old house's laundry room. It was only ten years overdue. Okay, we'll cut me some slack and call it four years overdue since that's when I scraped the bonus room and it was the next-to-last room to be scraped, and promised I'd move onto the laundry room next.
It took me under two hours, start to finish. Honestly, in the last four years, I couldn't spare two hours to scrape the blasted ceiling and a couple more hours to paint it??? I have made myself a promise that I will focus on the success and I won't beat myself up over these loose ends, but that was definitely a hall-of-shame project. It's done, and the new owners - whoever they might be - can enjoy the house popcorn-free.
Bonus: Also on Saturday I rearranged an alcove in the new garage so I can use my wire shelves from the old house and store my canning supplies and other stuff that's coming out of the attic. As I swept and tidied, guess what I found behind the water heater? The missing wand to the wood blind we just hung. So now to replace the replacement with the original, and take the other wand back to the old house. Confused yet? Me, too.
Monday. I can't take full credit for this one, but I did help. A little. My brave menfolk - all three of them - took turns climbing into the fiery furnace (aka attic) and handing down boxes and tubs. No one could stay up there long - it was simply too hot. Sidenote: Two attics are NOT double the fun. The Christmas and other seasonal stuff is now tucked away in the new walk-in attic (God bless the genius architect who first designed a house with an attic you can WALK into instead of climb into.) The canning jars are now on their new shelves in the garage, along with the ice cream freezer and even our turkey fryer/low country boiling pot. (Forgot we even had it!)
Unfortunately, the rest of the stuff is now one ginormous loose end. The old house's garage looks like a scene from "The Hoarders" with six piles o' stuff: one for each member of our family, plus one designated for a garage sale. The next step in the process is for the individual piles to begin shrinking as everyone culls through their stuff and moves things to the garage sale pile, or to the trash. But when theory meets reality, they are often complete strangers, unknown to each other. Sigh. I'm sure the piles will eventually go away.
Tuesday. I patched all the nail holes and did a final clean sweep of the old house before the painters arrived. I can finally say the house is really and truly ready to be painted.
The rest of the week was spent on getting several work-related tasks and volunteer loose ends pushed to the finish line, in between playing swim taxi to and from practice. I'm hoping next week I'll have a little more time to tie up a few more loose ends, because I do believe I am on a roll.
Happy end-tying!
