Morning AB, All
As always AB, thank you for doing this thread, for starting it, for monitoring it, for providing links and the summary after all the talking is done.
Of course I noticed. We all did! So thanks again.
Couple of things this week.
First….garage.
Indeed.
Been here ten years and from the start a whole bunch of crap was in the garage. Oh for a while we used the refrigerator the former owners left in the garage. And I had every plan to use the smallish upright freezer they left behind. The refrigerator, well it costs extra to run another fridge though we used its freezer compartment. Only problem, in the winters the freezer wouldn’t work and anything in it would thaw. Husband told me cause air temperature so cold it doesn’t think it needs to flip on, thus the food thaws.
Not to mention all the other junk that ended up in the garage over the years. House gets cleaned for painting, re-configuring. Stuff to be moved so where else you gonna put it?
I called somebody who came and boom, took the fridge and little freezer thingy (which I NEVER used cause, come on, the freezer above the fridge didn’t work in cold weather, I’d have been nuts to fill the freezer for IT to thaw out and melt). Guy backed up right to my garage door, rolled the fridge and freezer to the truck...threw it in….hit the button, boom, the big thingie mabingie came down and CRUSH….no more fridge and freezer. They were about thirty years old, May they rest in the landfill graveyard in peace.
Then I rented a thingamabingie that sits in my driveway and accepts trash. A big dumpster is what it is. They deliver it, set it where I want, then they come back and pick it up.
So granddaughter and daughter come down for weekend. We remove the Jeep from the garage, husband’s car to the street.
Then we begin.
We empty EVERYTHING, all built in furniture stuff, shelves, drawers, the built in cedar closet mabingie….EVERYTHING.
We make piles in the driveway. We make an “outdoor decoration” pile, a “pet supply” pile, a “craft” pile, a “home goods” pile, of course a “garden tool” pile. We have a tool pile and an electrical pile, the big ladder, the lawn mower, the pressure washer (we live in the swamps, must have such a thing to keep algae at bay), the leaf blowers, all the BJ’s supplies of toilet paper, paper towels and the like.
The whole driveway filled with piles of stuff and you probably know what happened next.
All day long people stopping buy to peruse our “yard sale”. We did everything to keep them at bay, waving them off from the street but they stopped and some of them even walked all around our “piles” of stuff as they would buy when this was all my personal stuff.
“There’s a ‘yard sale’ sign at the end of your street,” the lady told me so, patiently, I told her, NOT MY yard sale. Still she walked in and out of the driveway piles, daughter and granddaughter giggling and me with hands on hips pondering the universe with this woman walking amidst my stuff. I told daughter hell with it, have her make me an offer.
Heh.
That dumpster got filled with junk, and junk, old fax machines, non-working leaf blowers, old pressure washers, bags of stuff, boxes of stuff, stuff that we didn’t know what it was and stuff. I would glance quickly and declare it a “household good” or for the dumpster.
With the empty garage we began to refill. All the while we listen to my Sanyo player hooked up to nice loud speaker and Kaitlyn and I dance in the now big empty garage and we dance in the driveway and the music alone probably attracted people.
We dance to “When I ruled the World” and “I Have Been Blessed”, Adele, Muse, Coldplay. Me and Kaitlyn dancing across the planet, picking up trash and playing air guitars and dancing, dancing, dancing. Little yappy dogs next door barking, neighbor lady peeking through the bushes, me and Kaitlyn ignoring as we dance, sing and sort through trash.
We put that which survived the culling back into proper places, a cabinet for electrical, the tools, the garden supplies, naturally. Paint stuff up here, home goods in the cedar closet with my winter clothes, shelving moved to where fridge and freezer were ready for BJ’s supplies, pet stuff, very important in this home, organized to protect bug-attracting food and litter piled in the corner.
It looks great and my Jeep is now proud to sit in the middle of all the neatness.
Finally, note about granddaughter. Wow, what a great kid. She worked like the dickens, she did, not to mention the dancing. She picked up trash with the dustpan, she carried the trash, she organized the home goods closet AND the craft closet and she did a great job.
Eight years old she is and she worked solid for five hours, dancing and working as hard as me and her Mom and she ran all the errands for us too, fetching soda and Mountain Dew as required.
I gave that kid $20 and wow, talk about dancing. She even crafted me a beautiful thank you card, this girl’s got all the talent of her favorite grandmother, I kid you not.
Hey, five hours work and hand to God, folks, I couldn’t have hired anyone who worked hard as Kaitlyn did would make, well what’s minimum wage nowadays? And I bet you those minimum wage people NEVER would have danced and sung with me like Kaitlyn did.
IF I get time later I’ll tell about the stuffed panther but moving on to the big Sandy storm, the LAST damn thing in the world I need, and Benghazi.