Tag: Big projects

House Next Door: The Dreaded Downstairs Kitchen

My younger kids are back in school today. My teaching won’t take off till next week, so today I dropped the kids off at school, came home and headed next door.

We really just have two rooms left, but they are a bit tricky. I didn’t have the trailer today and most of the stuff in the back bedroom is bulky enough that just needs to be thrown straight into the trailer. I bagged up as much loose stuff as I could.

We still have a closet of clothes that haven’t been gone through. But, I’m going to let my daughter go through them first and then just toss them straight into the trailer.

After that, I headed into the kitchen. Andy has already done a lot of work in here. There is a lot of glassware that is keepable, but we need to pack it into boxes so it won’t all break. Haven’t done that yet.

I threw away everything that was plastic and aluminum. There was an extensive amount of original Tupperware in the house. Nothing that I would want to store food in any more.

Unfortunately, there were still some cupboards with food stuff in them. I tried to look for dates and there werent any. So, old enough that they hadn’t put expiration dates yet.

That cupboard was not too bad. Mostly all glass jars and rusted out cans. I was standing up, lots of space around me, squeamish but doable.

Then I got to this cupboard..

It is in the island and I had to sit down on a stool with my back up against a cart and the bag right next to my legs and the cupboard was really deep so I had to reach way back to get stuff. I found myself whimpering and by the time I was done, I was shaking. I left one line of cans in the very back of the bottom shelf because in order to reach it I would have had to kneel down on the floor and stick my head in. Couldn’t do it. There is still one more food cupboard on the other end of the island, but I didn’t have it in me to do it today. Also, still have two fridges that need emptying.

I need an empty trailer and probably my husband there for moral support to finish off this kitchen and back bedroom. Getting so close to being done with the clean out!

House Next Door: Upstairs Room, Take 2

I went over to the free house today to clean out another room. This particular room we had already cleaned out, though not it’s closet. But, when people were going through the house to pick out things they wanted, this room became the dumping ground for all the sorting and it managed to get full of stuff again. So I tackled the room again and also did the closet, which turned out to be a lot bigger and roomier than I first realized.

My two youngest came over to help. I set the eleven year old on fan and lamp duty. He found some fans and figured out which ones worked and then came and set them up for me. I opened a couple windows and it stayed decent. There is a kitchen upstairs that we haven’t tackled yet and the eleven year was poking around in there and realized there was a window unit AC in the window. He turned it on and it worked! But I had him turn it off cause I’m still paying the electric bill. But maybe when we tackle the kitchen and bathroom up there we can put on the AC. Though the open windows and fans do also help with the smell. I don’t know, we’ll see. The boys were a great help carrying keepables downstairs for me and they had fun poking through the stuff.

Here’s the closet.

This upstairs is considered the 2nd floor, but there’s a walk out basement where we have the trailer, so when I throw the trash out the window, I’m throwing it down three floors.

Here’s the window I wrestle all these bags through.

With my dog admiring the view.

I squeeze the trash bag through the window and then have to balance the bag on the little overhang and scoot it over so that it will fall down into the trailer. I was about to ask my little boys to help me with this, but then images of them leaning too far out the window made me change my mind. It feels a little precarious.

While we were cleaning my boys also discovered a snake skin in the room I was cleaning.

Which did not make me feel real comfortable cleaning out the deep dark closet. But, God has been merciful and I have not come across wildlife and bugs and snakes yet.

We are getting close to our one year anniversary of starting this project. I would love to have everything at least cleaned out by that milestone. We’ll see!

Free House: Getting Easier

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.

Free House: Moving Slow

Hey Everybody! I haven’t been on here in a bit, life got really busy, and then I got a bad cold and all of that kept me from getting over to the free house to clean. But today a friend came over to help and that made it a lot of fun. We continued to work on the bedroom. This room has been really slow going. All the stuff is densely packed in, so even though we only got another quarter of the room cleaned out, the pile of trash is pretty impressive.

Here’s where we started:

And then here’s we ended up:

And here are all the piles of trash we moved out:

We found some interesting things today, which always makes the cleaning out more fun.

I feel like we have hit that point in the project where it seems so big and overwhelming and the progress seems to be inching so slowly, that I feel a little discouraged. Right now I’m trying to not think of all the things that have to be done and just focus on cleaning out one room at a time. Hopefully the next update won’t take as long as last time!