Free House: Moving Upstairs

It’s been a while since I’ve been on here. We had one of the busiest holiday seasons I’ve ever had. It was a lot of fun, lots of good memories, great time with my kids, and we ended with the wedding of my oldest son! Then all the kids that came home for Christmas left, school started back up, and this weekend is the first time that I’m feeling like I can catch my breath a bit. It’s been a great day, I got my grocery shopping done first thing this morning, assigned my kids some chores, and then Andy and I went next door to tackle the next project. We worked three hours, came home, showered, and now I’m looking at the rest of the afternoon and evening with nothing on the schedule. Woohoo!

Today’s clean out was a lot more physically intense than normal. We have finally moved upstairs.

Which means everything has to come down those stairs, then you have to climb back up those stairs again to get back to work. We tossed lighter things down the stairs, but we escorted the big giant trash bags. At the top of the stairs is a rather large landing that had been turned into a bedroom.

We filled our trailer.

And then still had lots of stuff to fill another trailer load.

So, this is how far we got today, both of us working. I feel a little bit like an archeologist as I try to figure out the time line for the house. I found mail on the floor upstairs from 1999, which seems to be a significant year as I really haven’t found much mail or newspapers from before then. The upstairs ceiling is lath and plaster, and that started to fall apart at some point in time, so they put a cheap drop ceiling over the lath and plaster. Then I think enough of the original ceiling collapsed that it weighed down the drop ceiling and made that fall as well. So, we were cleaning up a lot of house debris today. As usual, I am always amazed at how much stuff can be crammed into one small space.

In other news, one of my older daughters went through some of the clothes that have been hanging in closets and tried washing them to see if they’d come clean, and they did! She is an eclectic dresser, so she had fun finding some things. This silk suit didn’t fit. Not sure what I’m going to do with it. But it’s clean!

Free House: Comfortable in a Mess

Another day of cleaning. I finished the first clean of the Parlour. The armchair, tv, rug, and lamp all need to get thrown out. I’m not sure if the very old sound system is worth saving or not. It appears to still be working. And then we have to go through and deep clean. But, I’m working on the initial cleanout first.

I think that our neighbor was doing most of her living in this room at the end. It looks like the chair was being used as a bed and there is a lot more food trash laying around. It was interesting, as I was cleaning I got the impression that this room had felt comfortable to our neighbor. I can’t say particularly why. But, it reminded me of my bedroom this past summer.

I did not clean my bedroom this past summer. I had some standards. I kept the trash in the trashcan and the dirty clothes in the dirty laundry basket, but other than that, my room was completely taken over by clutter. Clean clothes that didn’t all make it in the drawer, papers that my cat knocked off my desk, still laying in a pile on the floor. The sock basket that my kids’ socks all live in was spilling socks everywhere. Stacks of books. No dirty dishes, I didn’t want bugs..but you get the idea. I thought about cleaning my room, but I didn’t want to. Not because I didn’t want to clean, but because I wanted the cluttered atmosphere. For whatever reason, this summer felt really overstimulating. The bright sun, intense heat, lots of activities to get kids to and from. Whenever I could, I retreated into my bedroom. It was cool. Not overly bright. And it felt comfortable to me. For some reason, the idea of cleaning up my room and making it neat and organized made me feel like I would then have to be productive when I was in my room. I didn’t want to be productive. I didn’t want to look at a perfectly organized desk and feel the need to pay bills, or write, or do some creative project. I just wanted to exist in my room with no outside pressure. So I didn’t clean it. I kept the rest of the house clean, because those were shared spaces that a bunch of us had to be comfortable in, and where I wanted to invite other people into as well. But, my room was for me (and my long suffering husband who obviously didn’t care enough, because he didn’t take the time to clean it either).

When summer started coming to an end, I tackled my room, and several big cleanout projects in my house and got everything organized and ready to be productive in time for the new school year. But, as weird as it might be to some, I understand how you can be comfortable in a mess.

Here’s what things looked like before I started.

Here’s the pile of trash.

And another pile of trash, ready to go out the window down into our trailer, except the trailer wasn’t there today, so my husband gets to do that when he has time.

And here’s the end product. I think this is my favorite room.

And here’s me, worn out after two hours of manual labor.

Free House

Our elderly neighbor has not been living in her house for the past five years. During that time we have offered to help her sell her house. We’ve offered to help her clean out her house so she can do something with it. We’ve offered to rent her house. She was not interested in any of those offers and would always say, I’m just going to give you my house. Which seemed drastic, but also just seemed like something she liked to say. In the meantime, we mowed her yard and Andy was always the one she called when she had any issues with the outside of her property. Then last week, out of the blue, our elderly neighbor went to her lawyer and signed her house over to my husband. Free gift.

Now, we have never been in our neighbor’s house. We have lived next door for seventeen years and have been very curious, but our friendship and interactions always happened outside in the yard, never in a house. So, when Andy came home with the keys, we all trooped over to satisfy our curiosity. And then we discovered why the house has been empty for five years and why there was so much reluctance to do anything with it.

It is a hoarder house. We had to push things out of the way to open the door, and we were walking on trash about four feet deep throughout the entire house. The house was built in 1920 and has never been updated. The house has good bones and is worth fixing, but everything needs to be fixed.

The trash is overwhelming and Andy and I feel an urgency to get it cleaned out. After that, I’m not sure what the next step will be. On Saturday Andy went and cleaned out half a bedroom. He filled his trailer in only a couple hours. On Sunday, he started pulling all the scrap metal out of the basement and so far has made two large piles of metal by the alley which have been picked up by metal scrappers who drive by regularly. This evening I went over and helped him. We worked maybe an hour and half and filled up the trailer with trash again. He got one bedroom mostly cleaned out and I made it halfway down the hallway. My goal is to make a path to the front door so we can start using the front door. Right now we’re having to come up from the walk-out basement.

It’s definitely an interesting project. Also gross. By some minor miracle there are no obvious signs of mice and roaches and bugs. I imagine the fact that the house has been closed up for five years contributed to this. I can tell you that if it was full of roaches, I would not be helping my husband. As it was, I still had to take breathing breaks and stand by the open window. The bottom layer of the hallway had mail and newspaper from 2002, and I presume that this stuff has been sitting there that long.

I’ve decided to write about this whole process because I think posting pictures of our progress will be encouraging and motivating for us. I’ve also got lots of thoughts about our society and what has to go wrong for people to end up in these living situations. I’ll write more and try to let this blog be a place where we can watch chaos turn into order.