Starting Over

After living here for 3 years, I think we've finally decided to move in.

You know how sometimes, after living in a place for a while, you start to really get annoyed at the way things are... and just HAVE to fix them? We're totally there. So I'll probably be writing a lot over the coming weeks about the stuff we're doing to rearrange the house to make it more enjoyable for all of us to live here.

Part of the issue, of course, is that there are babies to worry about now... And the house is absolutely not baby proofed in the least. It's an outright danger zone! So, step #1 is creating a design around safer, more organized, more kid-friendly ideals. Step #2, unfortunately, is reorganizing all our s-t-u-f-f, and probably selling a ton of it. (Thank goodness for Craigslist, right?)

Today's project was the garage: we still have piles of stuff lying around from the gelato shop we just closed out (because we weren't sure what our successor would want of our stash exactly). So we finally just gave up and piled a bazillion plastic gelato cups in the recycling pile. So sad, but... There's really no one who will take them off our hands, and I'm not willing to spend money on shipping them somewhere.

Our garage is also filled with things that my gramma insists upon keeping even though there is no way in the world anyone in their right minds would want any of these things. Like a box of rocks. Literally. Or broken picture frames. Or a collection of old dental tools she might someday use to make wax moulds for casting jewelry. Or a "thing that pilots use," she told me when I held up some sort of unidentifyable mathematical tool. And about a million woven baskets of every shape and size (many with handles, so they don't even stack). And, of course, her giant collection of hundreds upon hundreds of seashells in tupperware stacked to the ceiling. And still, she really, truly, thinks that she's brutally whittled her stockpile of junk. These things are just "the essentials". And she can't understand how Colin could refuse to get rid of 2 of the 4 pieces of furniture that he owns. "But that dresser is so hideous." Hilarious. I love her, but she needs a serious intervention.

Can we get the Clean House TV show to come fix her? I don't think they'd do it. Our mess wouldn't make for good TV; her packrat-ism is too sneaky, because she's really good at hiding things. Like, filling up the entire garage, for example. Or the floor of her closet. Or filling all her dresser drawers -- rather than with clothing -- with her mother's old dolls, a "real indian papoose,"dozens of silk scarves and hankies, or a box of trilobites.

I'm not sure our house redo will actually even address a third of her stuff (it's so well hidden away I'm not sure I could even find it), and 80% of the third we find, she'll fight for. In the meantime, we can pretty easily address the mess we can see: the collection of video game boxes and action figures filling the top 2 feet of our game room; the random collection of not-particularly-attractive knick-knacks filling our foyer's bookcase, and by selling off all of the furniture that we hate (and replacing it with fewer, nicer pieces).