Clean Up, Clean Up

In some bizarre twist of fate, we have decided to finish our basement this fall. We had maintained that we were going to get our house paid off first (in about 5 or 6 years) before tackling that particular home improvement job, but the present economy has us changing our minds. Construction materials are at an all time low, and Wade's current job is paying him well enough that we can hopefully do this without taking out any Home Depot cards or loans. This situation could all change itself in the next few years, but we're confident at least for the next six months, we'll be stable enough to pull it off and so this weekend we started.

The first thing we have to do is figure out how to fit five bedrooms worth of stuff into three bedrooms upstairs. As well as everything else we have stored down there. Baby stuff. Memorabilia. Home repair items. Our basement has been the world's largest storage area for nearly six years. Of course, to fit everything upstairs, we also have to clean out the closets upstairs to make room. And in the process, we need to move Josh over to our TV room, move the TV room to the front room and reset up the nursery for baby #2. To make matters worse, there's not a lot of lifting I can do. But this seems to be our MO. Do everything the hard way.

So we started with the "easiest" thing. Moving the rooms around. Saturday, Wade disassembled our TV couch. Though the couch was the ugliest thing ever, it was nice to sit in and watch movies. There's no room for it anywhere else except out in the front room and I told Wade it was me or the couch because I wasn't putting that sucker out there for all to see. He relented and carted it in pieces to the garage. Meanwhile, we discovered that the couch was a man-eating couch. I've never seen so much stuff come out of a couch and it's now strewn across the house. Next, we had to move the TV to the front room. I've been resisting this since we moved in. The front room isn't set up to really accomodate a TV nicely and it's a little awkwardly placed, but I have to keep telling myself it's just a temporary solution. We don't use the TV that often--most of our tv watching comes off the computer in our bedroom--but we do watch movies occassionally on it, so it had to go somewhere. This concluded Saturday's activities.

Sunday, we spent much of the evening cleaning out the TV room and moving Josh's bed over to his "new" room. He was so excited. I have been given the task of cleaning the house today and cleaning out our bedroom closet. I can sense the jealously raging out of control throughout the wide web at how much fun I'll be having today. Tomorrow will be even better. I get to clean out the hall closets and make room in there for loads of stuff from the basement.

Our goal is to move everything but the treadmill and weight bench and a big metal desk upstairs so that we don't have to work around everything when we're finishing the basement. We'll see how well we accomplish this goal, but I'm optimistic that we'll get pretty darn close. We may have to use some of the garage.

So, let's mentally tally up the current stresses in our lives: Wade starts "new" job today (same job, new company), Sandra is 21 weeks pregnant and still feels icky, Graduate school starts in three weeks for Wade, Sandra's last class for her belated bachelor's degree starts in three weeks, new baby coming at Christmas time so Christmas shopping needs to be done with by Thanksgiving, high-maintenance church callings in a big ward for both Wade and Sandra, and--oh yeah--let's finish our basement while we're at it.

I just have to keep reminding myself that we need the room, it will be nice. We need the room, it will be nice.

Here's to happy cleaning!