Author: Average Jane

My husband and I are still living in our "starter house" after 13 years. It’s plenty big enough for two people and some cats, so we decided some time ago that we’re here to stay.

At the end of 2006 through spring of 2007, we had a lot of improvements made:

• Rec room above our garage converted to a recording studio
• Screened-in porch turned into my office
• Bathroom completely remodeled
• New roof put on
• Living room painted (I did that one myself)

Now that the memory of the noise, dust and inconvenience has faded, I’m ready to tackle another room.

Our guest room is that room – the one where the door stays closed all the time and junk piles up until you can barely walk in. The last time it got any real use was when my husband’s sister lived with us in the late ’90s. That’s also why it has purple carpeting (she was 15 when she moved in).

Here’s my plan:

• Rip out carpet and linoleum-covered sub-flooring and install hardwood flooring
• Remove the Ozarks-like paneling
• Scrape off the textured, glittery ceiling
• Replace cheap ceiling fan with modern track lighting
• Turn closet into a storage area for kitchen items

We’ll get a futon or daybed and set up the room as a secondary TV room and guest room. That way, when kids come over or we have a rare overnight guest, there will be a comfortable place for them.

Once we have the extra pantry space, I can get rid of the baker’s rack in the kitchen and put a breakfast nook in its place. Then we could finally have meals that don’t involve plates on our laps in front of the TV.

Now I just need to find someone to DO all this work.

When I ordered the dumpster last week, the guy told me that they’d leave it for seven days. Don’t ask me why I believed at the time that we’d probably call him and tell him to pick it up early. Right now it’s a little more than half full and we still have plenty to discard.

We’re actually making pretty good progress, but we just have so much stuff that it’s a challenge to put everything away even after we’ve separated the wheat from the chaff.

Right now I’m hung up on the huge plastic tubs o’ crap that have been hogging space in my office since November 2, 2006. Yeesh, it’s even more embarrassing with a date attached. I managed to empty one of them, but the other is mostly files, junk mail and the occasional CD (Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits! Natalie Imbruglia!). Everything is so jumbled that I have to look at one thing at a time and it’s taking forever.

Here’s a progress report:

Items Found

• My passport
• A nice floral dress in my current size
• Some black sandals I forgot I had that go nicely with the aforementioned dress
• The keys to my safe deposit box
• Two tubes of lip gloss and a good lipstick
• A huge collection of "You Don’t Know Jack" CD-ROM games
• Four "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" candy bars

Things Put on Craigslist

• GameBoy Advance SP with PacMan World 2 game
• Miscellaneous art supplies (which I’m donating to the Dreaming Zebra Foundation because they asked)
• Wrought iron canopy bed frame
• Sony Mavica camera (the kinds that uses 3.5" floppies)

Injuries Sustained

• Sore biceps from dismantling a wooden shelving unit with the flat side of an axe
• Dropped a baseball on my bare toe, which hurt more than you’d think

Judging by the current state of my office, it’s going to take several more days before I’m finished. When that day comes, though, I’m breaking out the champagne!

Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there.

I suppose it was mean of me to make my 77-year-old father come over and move junk out of my basement all afternoon yesterday. However, it did all belong to him and he left a good 50% of it behind.

This is what my dad looked like when I was a kid. He owned a dojo back then, and he taught judo and competed in tournaments. We used to have hours of greenish Super-8 film footage of martial arts competitions shot in dim, fluorescent-lit gymnasiums.

I’ve been so busy cleaning the house this weekend that I haven’t secured a Father’s Day gift yet. I’ll make sure to add that to my agenda.

Up until last weekend, today was supposed to be the day of our annual backyard party. We had our band lined up to play and we’d invited everyone we knew to come over, drink beer, jam, play in the yard, and eat grilled hot dogs.

We got cold feet when we saw the number of RSVPs. Usually we invite 150ish people and get 40 or so. This time around it looked as though the guest total was going to be in the 70-90 range. Our street would have been nearly impassably lined with cars for blocks, and we suspected that our neighbors would be coming after us with torches and pitchforks (or at least calling the police).

The best option seemed to be rescheduling the party and holding it at another venue. I thought we’d have all that squared away by now, but it looks as though we’re going to have to re-start our lead guitarist search AGAIN. [Heavy sigh.] Who knows when the party will be now?

Since that left us with a completely open calendar for the weekend, we decided to do our semi-annual house clean-out. That means going through the house, garage, basement and studio and throwing away every useless thing we’ve been storing since the last clean-out. I had a 20-cubic-yard roll off container delivered yesterday for just that purpose.

Considering that I haven’t even cleaned out my CAR since 2005 (judging by some paperwork I found in the hatch the other day), we have our work cut out for us. I know it’ll be very satisfying when we’re finished, though.

First, I’m going to yoga class and to help out my community service organization with a volunteer event at a nursing home. After that, it’ll be time to empty every closet, drawer, plastic tub, shelf and darkened corner on the property.

If I have time after that, I may clean and seal the grout in our main bathroom and paint the walls in our guest bathroom. Or perhaps that could be a project for another weekend…

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

When I was a kid, I was always in trouble for talking. I guess some things never change.

I went to Border’s tonight and bought two items that at first glance would seem completely unrelated. Then I looked at them together: