One thing leads to another

Progress on the house has been slow. There are just so many other things to keep one busy, like working, sleeping, and eating.

But Michael has recently been plugging away at the little things, the things that take a few minutes here and there, or a few hours every night for weeks; things that accumulate into some much-needed changes.

The biggest project like this that he’s tackled is the Great Basement Cleanup. Ever since we moved in, the basement has been a mess. I guess that’s what basements are for and, since we never really had one before, we reveled in having a clean, dry basement where we could dump things and forget about them for a long, long time. Trouble is, we were losing thing down there, and were having trouble walking around, or giving the furnace guy access to the oil tank filter.

And then there was the need to have a workshop. A place to use all the cool tools we have but have been packed away for two years. What’s the point of having a basement if you can’t make sawdust in it?

So, several weeks ago, Michael started organizing the basement. He opened long-forgotten boxes, made many trips to the recycling center, pulled out mountains of old kid clothes and other things for donation (which Hyla and I dropped off at the local donation dropoff), put peg boards up, hung tools on the pegboards, unpacked various nuts and bolts and washers and hooks and screws and other tiny pieces of metal AND organized them. And now we have the beginnings of a workshop:

The boards you see on the floor there are for the first project that will come out of this workshop: a set of built-in shelves that will run the length of a wall in Hyla’s room and will give us a place to put all the toys we removed from the basement (organizing a house seems to be circular this way).

Mmmmm… so many tools:

The basement cleanup project became infectious, so it also became the office cleanup project. The office is not what I’d call completely clean, but it is reorganized so that I get a view out the window:

And, in particular, I now have a view of this beautiful hummingbird feeder that my friend, Carole, gave me:

Putting up that bird feeder led to putting up the other feeders, including the hummingbird feeder outside the kitchen window:

We also have a feeder with sunflower seeds in it on the deck that was host to cardinals, finches, grosbeaks, titmice, nuthatches, chickadees and the like, but the squirrels have decided it belongs to them and only them, so we’ve moved it to a new location and I have yet to take a picture of that. As of yesterday, the birds seem to have found the new location.

Also while cleaning the basement, Michael hauled up all of the as-yet unhung pictures and started putting those up around the house. We have framed artwork up on the second floor, and now, after more than a year of living in the house, we have a bathroom mirror in the upstairs bathroom:

And, finally, our friendly door snake is back where he belongs, proclaiming “Eat Good Food, Be Kind, Tell the Truth”:

All that from cleaning the basement.