Time Flies

I behind, I behind, I know. Sorry. Life has just been way busy lately, and barely any time available. Sigh.

So lately the thing taking up most time and weekends is our basement. Yup...our basement. The dumping ground of old and/or pointless items has finally gotten to us. Who knew almost 20 years of junk and cobwebs could take so much time to clean up.

So for a Mother's Day gift us local kids have decided to help out. In a couple of weeks we will get a dumpster so we can throw away the stuff trash won't take, or we don't want to have to put into bags. :) But in the mean time for the past month every Saturday my sister-in-law Debbie comes over and she, Mom and I go at cleaning, organizing, throwing away, breaking stuff down and just overall exhausting work. Matt has come a few times here and there to help out with the heavy stuff we can't handle or don't want to handle. We then get 'homework' for the next weekend that we work on throughout the week...or on Friday nights...hehe.

So far we have gone through the food storage...most of which was showing dates from the early 80's. A few years ago...and we are wondering if not recently as well...we had mice in the basement. So they had gotten into some of the food storage...and some had just gone bad. The old shelves my dad had built in 1982 or so we broke apart...took some serious hammering...go Debbie! We have new plastic shelves that seem to work great so far, and that has cleared out tons of room.

The next weekend we went through all the old camping stuff, the leather collection from my Dad's old work, cleaned out part of the boy's old bedroom in the basement and threw away the old stuff by the laundry area and put in new shelves and plastic tubs for organizing laundry.

Weekend after that Debbie was out of town and I thought we'd get a break. Nope. :) We cleaned up the area at the bottom of the basement steps. We even got Debbie and Matt's kids involved as we watched them for the weekend while Debbie and Matt were out of town. The kids got to collect all the stuffed animals down there...most mine from childhood...and help go through those and the toys we had upstairs for them. Not too much we threw out cause 3 kids finding new toys or ones they forgot about they were just so excited. But some I just had to sneak into the throw away box just to get some more room going on.

So this weekend, Charlie, Debbie's step-dad came over to help as well. Debbie and Charlie finished tearing out the carpet from the boy's old bedroom...that was glued to the concrete floor, tore out the drop ceiling tiles, framing and mice tunned home insullation. They also tore off the dry wall from the bedroom walls that were also glued to the concrete. Mom and I worked on the tool area getting stuff cleaned and organized...we didn't finish but got quite a bit gone through and surfaces cleaned off. I think we had the easier end...I okay with that. :) Though now the basement smells like mold...something else for us to clean up.

Still left: finish cleaning tool area...which Matt may come and help go through, finish scraping the liquid nails 'glue' from the walls in the boy's old bedroom area, get some kind of adhesive remover to get the rest of the 'glue' off the floor from the carpet as well, paint the basement walls with dry lock (after we clean off the mold), clean out that last corner, get rid of all the old paint supply...tons of that going on. Kitty litter here we come (to soak it up so we can throw it away in regular trash, had to look up disposal options online). And put up shelves we have so far and get more if needed, clean out the garage as well, reorganize that junk, oh and possibly reorganize the basement and we may create work out area. I'm thinking that's all, but that's generalizing a lot.

So....

Saturday's spent getting dirty cleaning junk - 4
Shelves broken down - 4
Room torn out - 1
Bed's dropped off at good will - 2
Trips to Lowe's for stuff - 4 I think
Eww's heard - too many
Stank faces made - several from all involved
Mice bodies found - 5
Trash Bags used - I lost count after 35
Mom's pleasure of a clean and hopefully mouse free basement - Priceless

And more is still yet to be done. I forgot to do before pics, which Mom may have gotten mad if I posted cause she was quite embarrassed about our basement; but I will do after pictures once it is done. Which may not be for at least another month. Ahh winter with your lazy Saturdays...how I wish for you. Oh well, no time for wishing, onto more spring cleaning!