Almost Got it All

We started the holiday break with a lengthy list of things to do. Most of it had to do with the preparation of our new family member, which really meant - make more room.

Since Jen and I moved in four years ago, we've primarily lived on the top floor of our house (we have a bi-level), and either put or left everything else in storage downstairs. With a kid coming, with new furniture and a whole bunch of other crap on their own, we had to some reorganizing.

The main culprit is what we call the blue room. It's a room downstairs with blue carpet. It's served a couple of purposes over the four years and has been documented in this here blog. Lately it's just been a huge catch-all for stuff. It's caught so much stuff, you could hardly open the door.

What's amazed us most is that the majority of the stuff is now simply gone. We threw out a lot. We've made one trip to Goodwill - soon to make another. We Freecycled a bunch of stuff. One women called me the most generous person on Freecycle (meanwhile I'm cursing all the lousy-bastard no-shows). And we also moved things around.

We had storage in our garage attic that was hardly used. When we found something we needed to keep, but not use often, it got boxed and moved out to the attic.

The Picture is meant to be dark. That's how I saw it in all my trips into the garage yesterday. Kind of creepy. Reminded me of Samara's (The Ring) hideaway in the horse barn. No wonder all the horses killed themselves.

Items that needed to be handy, we moved into our newly organized "workroom" or the newly added shelves I put in our furnace room.

By 9pm last night our blue room had become simply another room.

Unfortunately that lasted all of five minutes. There are other rooms whose use take priority in the coming weeks, so the goal was only to get this one completely clear so we could clear out the other higher priority rooms.

Like I said - almost got it all.

At least now we're way closer to having it all clean and clutter free. More like a house we live in and not just a space we store stuff.

At least that's the effect I was going for when I hung some pictures in my gear room.

- b

Picture Says it All

- b

Miscellaneous Crap

Haven't been very project oriented over the holiday break.

I got the important thing done - getting the tractor ready to plow - in case of mid snow storm labor pains.

but after that it's all been random crap like taking the bad cleats out of my "old riding shoes", so I can replace them and stop using my "good shoes".

Like I ride enough to warrant "old" and/or "good" shoes. Don't have new cleats yet. Wouldn't really need them till it warms up anyway.

I did some website work (refresh your cache), but nothing as far as necessary improvements, just maintenance.

I also reorganized my detached garage so the truck is NOT parked on the side with access to the attic. We've been moving a lot of the crap that's been unused in the house to the detached garage attic. Having that space more easily accessible (not having to move the truck every time) will make it more viable. In the process I actually emptied three or so boxes that had been packed in the garage since we moved here. Now my workbench is almost usable.

I also started a top-secret project with my commuter bike and the trainer.

Yes I plan to start riding the trainer, but there's an added piece waiting on parts to complete the project. More to follow soon.

We've also been running a lot of baby stuff errands. We spent one morning measuring the walls and current furniture in our nursery, then looking online at various nursery pieces to see what we liked and what might fit. We settled on some things, ran down to the store and placed an order.

Jen has also been procuring and organizing lots of "cute outfits." We might actually be ready for this thing when it comes.

What to do today?

- b

Not Nesting Yet

Not quite nesting, but we've been working feverishly to get things cleaned up and make more room for the baby.

So far on our holiday break, I finished/completely hacked my toolbox shelf thingy.

Cleaned up the gear room.

Which I've done numerous times, but this time was significantly different. I had and used this box in the gear room,

which I built the summer after my freshmen year in college. I built it as a gear/storage box that fit perfectly behind the cab of my truck and between my roommates and my loft in our dorm room. In my apartment in Spring City it was my gear box and sat in the living room. The same went for our house in Paoli. You can see the scratches on top where CJ used to jump on it to see/bark out the window.

In our house now, where I have an entire room (with closet) for gear, the box was taking up more room then saving it. Soon enough it could be a toy box for kids, but for now it will move out to the garage to hold tools or something.

The next room is our "blue room".

Though it looks in shambles, we've made a lot of progress here. Jen spent the weekend "filing" (either filing or throwing away) all the papers and documents we had stored in here. I've got a huge pile and list on Freecycle to get rid of a bunch of stuff and there's a huge pile for the trash. Hopefully by the end of today we'll have more then just a spare closet, but a spare room as well.

- b

Spare Closet is Ready

Who knew it would take so long for a closet?

Finally got around to wiping down the walls. I won't go into how nasty that actually was. Let it dry and now it's usable.

It's so nice to check things off the list. No matter how small they may seem.

Next step is to get the room in which the closet is in cleaned up and the room in which the baby will be nurserified.

- b

A Little More

While "working from home" yesterday afternoon I was able to do a few more things with our new overflow closet.

Exciting huh? A bar by which to hang stuff....

I even vacuumed the space. The only thing left is wiping down the walls and the shelf. Because the cat litter box used to be housed in here, it's a little dusty.

- b

Mixed Bag

Originally I was supposed to be away this weekend. When plans changed keeping me home, I kind of decided to not do anything and maybe relax a little.

So even though I knew it was supposed to rain/snow Saturday afternoon and I wouldn't have another chance until January, I didn't do the last bit of the leaves in the yard to finish up with them for the year.

But I didn't sit around and do nothing either.

Part of my responsibility in the whole nesting phenomenon is the preparation side. We have a room designated as "the nursery" but it's currently a bedroom with overflow from our closet and drawers. The first task for me is to make available closet space elsewhere, so the closet in "the nursery" can be utilized solely for baby stuff. Seems basic and off-topic from nursery nesting conversations, but I bet fathers everywhere have performed similar tasks prior to the execution of nesting - so follow along.

We have a "spare" room downstairs that we've used mostly for storage - storage of crap we could really just get rid of. In that room is a closet that we've used primarily as our IT closet. In there we had our computer, patch panel, printer, network storage, switches, cables, etc. The idea is to make that closet available as our overflow and rearrange the IT stuff to do so.

Rearranging the IT stuff meant moving most of it out of the closet and into our "work room" where we have these shelves that again we've poorly utilized since moving here. For the most part we just toss things up there and dig around for them later when we need it. That's a huge waste of space. So one of the very first tasks for me in preparing for "the nesting" is organizing these shelves.

Are you still following? We've gone from nursery closet, to spare closet, to work room shelves. See the path?

You can see in the photo I've started a little on the middle shelf on the left. I've been picking low hanging fruit so far and that section was easiest.

The next easiest piece was the toolbox area. In the middle of the shelves I had some toolboxes stacked. Some of which were empty, some of which belonged in other places, and some of which took up too much space. In the picture to the right you see my "roll-away" pieces. The top half has always sat on this little shelf I had made for it. The lower piece was sitting in the middle of the above mentioned shelves taking up too much space. Why I never added it to the collection on the toolbox shelf, I have no idea. Eh. That's not true. The reason it was never added was because the bottom shelf wasn't built to hold it. The legs didn't provide enough space for it to fit down there, so that was the next task.

A little measuring, some cutting, this should be quick and easy!

Not quite. First I didn't accommodate for the lock and label, so after cutting a bunch, making a lot of sawdust, and stuffing it in there, I had to pull it all out, measure and cut again.

Now it slid in past the lock, but I had another issue. I completely forgot that the legs on the other side needed cutting too for the box to completely fit on the shelf.

Doh!

Didn't matter. Jen had another task that needed attention.

Once the tree was up, we headed off to our friends house for the afternoon, so everything was left as it was.

Now back at it on Sunday, for some reason I decided to leave the toolbox as it was for now. I guess I decided the availability of the closet was more important and the empty shelf (from the big set of shelves) the toolbox made was enough to move out the computer equipment from the closet.

So I moved out the equipment and reorganized what had to stay in the closet so we could utilize the closet for it's original intention - hanging clothes.

It's not pretty, and I could have spent a lot more time on constructing a more sophisticated rack for the patch panel, but it's functional and I've got a lot more crap to get to. At least now we have a closet where we can hang clothes (once I put up the bar) that even has an available shelf for whatever else.

I still need to get back to that toolbox and the rest of the shelves in the basement. And now that I look at those pictures of my toolboxes precariously stacked on that rickety little wooden deal, I probably need to do something to strengthen and secure that thing so it doesn't come tumbling down when some little tyke decides it's a jungle gym.

- b

Light on the Projects

Didn't have a whole lot of time or motivation yesterday so I only got the deck furniture hauled up into the attic.

At least it was a semi-fun engineering endeavor.

At some point I need to make a door/cover for the opening in our garage ceiling to tidy things up a bit.

- b