Picture Tuesday

I'm a pod. I know this, you know this.

And as a pod, I have certain irrationalities I live with. I may not be proud of them, but there's no reason to deny them when I know they are true. One of these irrationalities is the fact that I just go flat-ass batshit crazy when my house is in upheaval.

I learned this fact a few years ago when Mr M and I decided to paint my kitchen cabinets. It was great - the first weekend. We were tearing off doors and taking off handles and painting ugly varnished brown stuff white, and having a ball. Then the weekend ended and Mr M had to go back home, and the job wasn't finished. I had paint and plastic tarps and half-done cabinets in the floor and cabinet contents all over my house for the next week, and I was one hinky individual.

At the beginning of the year I decided my Next Big Project was getting rid of some stuff. I have way too much shit for one person. I have stuff I'll never use. I have too many clothes, too many shoes, too many handbags, too many sheets and towels, too many hair products. Too many dishes and pots and pans, and too many everything.

I decided the best way to start this weeding of objects from my life was to get the spare bedroom, aka The Beast, in shape. I've had this project before. The Beast is the place I store everything in my house I have no other place for, which of course I have way too much of, and so I'll work like mad to get things put away and look around six months later, saying, "I really did clean this place up a while back, didn't I?"

But lately, The Beast has just become completely unmanageable, and I decided that the only way I was going to get any kind of handle on it was to have a room of shelves. I've toyed with this idea before, deemed it too much trouble, and let it go, but since the New Year I haven't been able to let go of it. So I earmarked some money for Beast Improvement, made some plans, and finally got going on it this past weekend.

The problem with this is that to adequately clean and sort, the entire room - and believe me, folks, it's a full room - has to be turned upside down, moved elsewhere, sorted through, judged, and thrown away or kept. And again, since Friday, my house have been upheaved. And I've been on the verge of, well, heaving ever since.

Since Friday night I've not been able to walk through my house. There's something pretty much everywhere. And to be honest, since I've been sick (what, two weeks now?), the house hasn't been in its cleanest state, anyway.

So now, going to the bathroom involves stepping over the footstool and do-si-doing around the step ladder. Getting anything out of the closet involves moving the fan and one of the three vacuum cleaners, and going from the living room to the bedroom via the hallette - well, that's nigh-on impossible. Instead, I have to go around into the kitchen, through the laundry room and into the hallette, stepping over the footstool and do-si-doing around a set of shelves I have no place for. The Beast is still an ungodly mess, though it's slowing falling into shape, and having this morning as trash day helped a great deal when I was able to get rid of three huge shelving boxes and four leaf and garden bags full of trash that were also cluttering up the Poderosa for the past four days.

Anyway, the whole project began on Friday night, when I decided that although an entire room of shelves would be fun, I have clothes I don't want hanging out in the open. So I decided that maybe I should keep my chest of drawers after all. See, I have a chest in The Beast, a chest so old I remember having it in my bedroom when I was in the seventh grade. There was no reason trying to get rid of it, because 1) it would serve the purpose of housing clothes and 2) no sane human being would take it, and it was too big to set out as trash. So I decided to give it a makeover.

Here's my original old chest of drawers.

























Ick. And after Friday evening, here's my Extreme Makeover chest of drawers.

























Not bad. Clean, matches the room, and minus the handles that look like they were forged in 1865. I also weeded three of those four drawers empty, and the clothes are safely at the mission.

Saturday I headed, as usual, to B'burg and Mr M's, to visit, play clarinets, and get the shelves I'd earmarked money for. When I got to B'burg, Mr M and the DeepFatFriar were sitting on the sofa. They were watching golf.

Now, when those two men are sitting watching golf something is terribly, terribly wrong, and it took me no time to realize that the both of them were suffering a good dose of the flu I'd been fighting for the past two weeks. They both looked, acted, and sounded miserable, and I stayed a little while, went out to get the shelves, came back for a bite of Chinese, and headed back home. I didn't want to sit and look at them in their zombie-like state, and I doubt either of them felt much like company. (However, the Friar did go with me for the shelves, and was so kind to help me load them into a basket and into my car. At great physical cost to his ailing body.)

I got back home by about 10:30 on Saturday night, and immediately set about the shelving task. I started with the larger set. They were - large. Very easy to put together, but not really a one-person job. I now have three blood blisters and a rather large knot on my head. However, I kept at it, and by Sunday afternoon had one nice full set of shelves.

























This is a marvel, folks, because that side of the room was where I had piles - I mean piles - of stuff thrown on top of itself. I half expected to find rats, a bird's nest, or possibly Jimmy Hoffa by the time I finally reached the carpet under all that stuff.

I stopped taking pictures at that point, and got to working. As of tonight I have all three sets of shelves up, two filled, and one almost filled. But I'm not through. I still have things to rid from my life, and much cleanup, and, well, I don't see an end to it until about Friday, and that's a lot of hinkiness from Poderosa upheaval. I'll survive, though.

In the meantime, would anyone like some movies on VHS, or a handbag? They're free!

Betland's Olympic Update:
* And I haven't even mentioned that I cleaned out the linen closet before all this began. It's beautifully clean, but you can't have any of the 8 sheet sets I got rid of (Granny got those), or the bath towels promised to Mr M.