Corky Little Bits

Well, we signed the loan documents last Thursday morning. So tomorrow or the next day, basement money will be in our bank account.

To celebrate this momentus occasion, we decided to catch up on some of those insanely procrastination-producing small tasks over the weekend. The first was the poop pipe, which we extended above the roof line at long last. Ahhh, the sweet smell of success. Literally! Unfortunately, now we have this stupid looking white PVC curling up the house - so we'll have to paint it, but that will be procrastinated until a later date.

Then, we stripped, sanded, and painted an old army locker that I found for free on the side of the road at the beginning of summer... like I've been wanting to do since the beginning of summer. Once it was done, we brought it into the mudroom and I put all of our coats in there - since we don't have a coat closet, all the coats were taking over MY closet. We can't have that, now can we?

We also got a chance to really do some cleaning and throwing out of crap. In the yard we still had an old window, old broken gutters, two halfs of a broken garden hose, the rotted cover to our boat that the previous owner wrecked when he left it out in the blizzardy winter, misc boat engine parts, random rusty metal peices and pipes, a bucket full of tile from when we tiled the kitchen floor... last winter, empty joint compound buckets, a car window screen that appeared magically in the yard, two kitchen faucets that sucked more than the third that we actually used, and a ten year old box fan that finally kicked the bucket.

Our neighbors passed us as we drove to the dump - I'm sure they were happy to see the truck loaded high with all that junk. This is an exciting blog isn't it? Today - we went to the dump. Yay dump! Bear with me people and I'll tell you a good story next. Getting rid of trash is very liberating.

In the house, I really started to organize stuff via techniques seen on one of my other HGTV favorites, Get Organized! One of the key parts to organization is storing everything together so you only need to go to one place when you need something. I consolodated all the gift wrap materials like shrink wrap, ribbons, baggies, etc. into the wrapping paper container instead of my closet. I cleaned out my 3 jewelry boxes and organized them - one for fine, fancy stuff and earrings (which had previously been strewn all willy-nilly over the bathroom cabinet) and one for ghetto bad girl hoochy coo stuff. (You know, the studded leather collar, the light up techno club necklace, the gothic armband - bet you never pegged me for a ghetto bad girl hoochy coo, did you? I'm a complex individual.) I was able to get rid of one jewelry box - and of course anything that was broken or hated imensely.

I finally got all the books out of the closet and milk crates and into the bookshelves. I then used the milk crates in the mudroom to organize my laundry and cleaning supplies. I also cleaned out the bathroom cabinets (which by the way, are leftover kitchen cabinets that just wouldn't fit in the kitchen) and I put everything into two tool boxes. Now maybe next week we can throw out those cabinets.

It feels good to be almost unpacked! How long has it been now? Ten months? We're making headway on really living here, not just staying here.