With my son’s help this week (well for the last few days at least) we’re starting to get some of the nasty clutter and neglected areas of the house cleaned up. He’s doing all the heavy lifting and boxing and I’m doing the pointing and directing. Well some of it anyway. I’ve had to bend and lift a few times more than my back likes, so I’m going to be one sore puppy by the time we’re all done with this and he heads back to campus.

There are some areas that I haven’t seen the floor under in awhile. Nice to know they are still there and I can get from here to there without having to dodge a table full of this or that.

The cats are thrilled. They have more room to chase one another now. Tooey played with her tail for almost a solid hour last night. She overdid herself and threw up on the clean carpet.

I think the hardest things to do are to say goodbye to some of the things that the kids made for me when they were little. Clay sculptures out of Play-Doh or popsicle sticks that I haven’t remembered I had that were too dusty to salvage. We took some pictures, but they didn’t come out too well. Even though I kept this stuff in a cabinet they were past hope.

There will be a lot more room to put things when we are done…at least to keep some stuff until the weather is proper for garage sales and such. Some things will go directly to donation. Clothes that are too small that have been stocked in the boiler room, old shoes and toys, etc.

One thing I did find out though. The front of the house is always the hottest part because the back room is where the thermostat is and it doesn’t register above about 65-70 out there, so the heat keeps coming on and as a result the front gets really cooking. So I’ve been opening the door to the arctic entry so I can get some cool air in, right? Well we were planning on buying a large bale of hay and keeping it out there for the bunnies, to be sure they had some nice, bug-free food. The problem I noticed tonight is, while the door to the house is open and all the heat comes out, it starts to thaw the roof over the entryway and…drip-drip-drip…wet ceiling and wet everything out there.

I can’t tell you what a bummer this is. I have some things stored out there in boxes that belong to my daughter. I told her they’d be safe out there and now they are not. She will not be happy, especially if any of her books were soiled. I don’t know what has been ruined and what hasn’t, and now I can’t open my front door to get cool air in the house either.

But at least we found out this was a problem before I went and got an expensive (and very heavy) bale of hay that I would’ve had to throw out. This will not be a good storage area for anything until we can reconstruct it this summer. Anything in there will have to be put elsewhere before breakup, or natural thaw will ruin it all, if it hasn’t been ruined already.

Of course, by the time we do that, hopefully there’ll be less things to store! (ihopeihopeihope)  It really feels good to be simplifying things at last!

And the main goal will be…securing a bunny bonding area!