Still to Be Done

I’m find­ing a few things over­whelm­ing, so I need to break them down into small­er pieces. Maybe I should set myself a cer­tain num­ber of box­es to emp­ty each day?

Going through the rest of the box­es that are still in the garage is one of the intim­i­dat­ing tasks. I did emp­ty six small “mis­cel­la­neous” box­es yes­ter­day. They most­ly con­tained stuff that had been in the util­i­ty clos­et at the apart­ment and in the garage at the old house before that.

I know the garage will be much less over­whelm­ing as soon as curiousmay9 and sam­bear get the bikes hung up on the walls, and the last few pieces of fur­ni­ture go to their new homes.

After that, I’ll be able to get to some of the box­es that are left. I’ll still have to get some­one to car­ry them in for me, but if I can read their labels we’ll know where they should go.

I must estab­lish a med­i­cine cab­i­net. Every­thing but the pre­scrip­tion meds was just thrown into a box. Right now, it’s a major pro­duc­tion to find Tylenol or a BandAid. I’d like to get some of those stag­gered ris­er orga­niz­ers so that we can SEE every­thing in the med­i­cine cab­i­net with­out hav­ing to move the front stuff around.

I’m near­ly done with sort­ing the mess of cables/connectors/computer “stuff.” Sev­en box­es are ready to go out to the garage cabinets/shelves for stor­age (pow­er cables, A/V “stuff,” speak­er wires, coax cables, tele­phone “stuff,” things that con­nect to a car’s cig­a­rette lighter, and pow­er trans­form­ers). I need to emp­ty more small box­es so that I can sort the com­put­er stuff by type (video, par­al­lel, ser­i­al, USB, and net­work cables, then var­i­ous sorts of cards, ancient dri­ves, and speak­ers) and put them out there too. As soon as we have the PCs here prop­er­ly set up, we’ll have a lot of stuff to give away.

You know, I seem to do this “sort­ing” thing at least once a year. How do all those cables get mixed togeth­er again?

Well, I need to amend that. I’ve sort­ed all such things that are on the first floor of the house. curiousmay9 has more upstairs, but I’ve decid­ed to per­mit those to live in their SEP fields unless she requests help.

Then there’s paper­work. Gods, but it builds up quick­ly! I haven’t been able to get to the files eas­i­ly enough since we moved, so noth­ing has been filed. I swear there are paper demons who do noth­ing but increase the num­ber of pieces of paper around here and move them to cre­ate confusion.

For the most part, books haven’t gone onto book­shelves next. In the bed­room, that’s large­ly because we need to fin­ish paint­ing the trim and doing some touch-ups on the walls. In the sit­ting room, we know that we have to take down two walls to repair them, and we’ll be strip­ping up the car­pet in the entire mas­ter suite. Book­shelves full of books are FAR more dif­fi­cult to move than emp­ty ones! 

But I do want my books. I miss them. If I start going through the box­es to find the books that can be placed in the liv­ing room, I fear I won’t be able to stop.

One of the best things we’ve done is to des­ig­nate a huge, bright pink tub in the garage as the spot for things that are GOING AWAY. They’re small things, mostly—not worth ask­ing friends if they want them or offer­ing on Freecy­cle. Every Tues­day, curiousmay9 takes what­ev­er is in the bin and donates it to charity.

As for the Hon­ey-Do list:
1) Some of the speak­er or net­work wire needs to be secured so that it isn’t droop­ing down and vis­i­ble (or trip­ping people).
2) I want the shelves for­mer­ly in the guest room remount­ed in our bath­room as stor­age that I can get to with­out bend­ing over or kneel­ing (which HURTS).
3) Hang the bul­letin board and paintings.
4) Any­thing that’s in the guest room must be moved out
5) The car­pet steam­er needs to go upstairs
6) The guest room car­pet needs to be steamed
7) Then we treat the guest room and most of the rest of the house for bugs
8) The fur­ni­ture in shad­owkatt’s room moves into the guest room
9) The car­pet in her room gets steamed
10) Her room gets the bug spray
11) The blinds that fell need to be rehung, and the last set put in place.
12) Get rid of the hor­nets’ nest outside
13) Knock down the spi­der­webs on the out­side of the front windows
14) Clean the win­dows, inside and out. (I can do the low­est ones inside in small incre­ments, but again, lift­ing my arms up caus­es a lot of pain. And we must clean the win­dows before apply­ing the win­dow film pur­chased for the top ones in the entryway.)
15) Apply the win­dow film
16) Hang the bikes in the garage
17) Move the spare fur­ni­ture to the Cottage
18) Replace the dam­aged duct in the attic
19) Put the air fil­ter into place in the attic
20) Get the mount­ing hard­ware for the mark­er board
21) Hang the mark­er board
22) But the oth­er blinds
23) Hang up the rest of the blinds

Obvi­ous­ly, this isn’t stuff that’s expect­ed to be fin­ished today 🙂

I know there’s more to be plant­ed in the gar­den, and it all needs water­ing. I find it amaz­ing how quick­ly the young plants wilt!

curiousmay9 is still work­ing on fin­ish­ing the quar­ter-round in her bed­room and office/den. She’s sick, so that’s been slowed down further.

Repair of the walls, roof, and win­dow frame is such a big project that I’m not even putting it on the list. It’ll take up an entire week­end at the very least.

Oh, and then there’s school stuff. Right.