Andy and I went over to the free House to work today and I have to say, I think this is easiest session we’ve had so far. Highlights were no poop or pee and no rotten food. Woohoo!

We are in the upstairs now.

So apparently, when our neighbor first moved into this house it was in the 80s and she rented the upstairs from the elderly woman who lived there. There used to be a stairway that went up the outside of the house. Here’s what’s left of it.

There was a door which was obviously not original to the house.

The room we cleaned today must have been her living room. Here’s the before.

We found some interesting things today, including this giant safe thats not going to be fun to get back down the stairs.

If you’d like an electric hotdog cooker, I can help you out.

We actually found a lot of vintage, odd small appliances, all in their original packaging.

Since we cleaned the hallway last time, we were able to throw things out the upstairs hall windows instead of hauling everything down the stairs, which also made everything easier. We could have kept cleaning but our trailer was completely full again.

Here’s the after picture.

We’ve been talking a lot more about what we’re going to do with the house. On days when we are feeling poor and overwhelmed we tend to feel like just selling it. But then we revive and think of how amazing it would be to have it fixed up and available for use. That is still the plan, but sometimes it feels a little impossible. So we push on, one step at a time. We’ll do everything we can and then when we hit a roadblock we’ll reassess. For now, there’s lots of cleaning to be done, yardwork, and several repair projects we can do with minimal funds, so no roadblocks in the near future.