Vacation house day

I actually spent the first hour or two of my vacation day writing for work (not my norm, but things are busy there and it put me in a much better mentality for taking the day off).

I brought over two carloads of stuff – the first was the bulk of the downstairs closet (all of our sports/camping gear, plus college notes and coursework) and almost all of my paper files, and the second was all of the wood that we’ve had stashed under beds, couches, and the corners of closets for the last three years. (I had a brief wood working spell when we first moved out here until it became clear that there was nowhere really to handle such projects. I’m so excited about the new garage!!)

Then, I spent a little bit longer adding to the trash pile in the garage and driveway – there were plenty of trash bags of rotten pine needles in the back yard, some rotten pallets, some half-used moldering bags of topsoil, wet carpet, leftover fencing, rusted metal plant stands, broken playskool climbers, etc. I dragged them out to the front Luckily, our seller’s realtor agreed to haul all of this (and yesterday’s garage collection) away for us, and so I wanted to make it accessible for whoever came to retrieve it.

I also found some treasures – some long-handled clippers in good shape, a wire rake, a nice 6’ step ladder. I brought those all over to the garage, but first used the clippers to make paths in each of the side-yards so that we can walk without stooping. Much better. Though clearly, there’s still a LOT of progress to make. (If anyone has advice about when to clip rhododendrons and hydrangea in Seattle so that they still bloom the next year, I’m all ears!!)



With no other good ways to procrastinate, I reattacked the cupboards. They’re finally clean, and I took apart the face of the oven to reattach the handles that we found on the counter. Next up is shelf paper for the bottom shelves.



Meanwhile, Kevin finished the last of the demolition.

While he worked on that, I went around with a plastic cup to remove all of the nails, hooks, screws and anchors left in the walls. I finished with almost a full cup – clearly I will be a master spackler by the end of the weekend. It looks like we may be painting a bit more than we originally intended to. The master bedroom is white, which would be fine except that the walls are pretty scratched/holey. We’re thinking yellow? (Kevin pointed out that regardless, it will probably match some portion of the quilt. :-)) The bedroom that will be my office is green, but has Winnie the Pooh art all over the place, and the painting was sort of uneven. I have yet to decide on a good color. White is boring, but I love it. Green and pink are both under consideration, but they’d have to be pretty pale since the room faces northeast and isn’t too bright.

Kevin’s bedroom/office will be painted, I’m sure, and we’ll probably do another coat of white in the fish room. The living room/dining room is a gorgeous citrus green, but we want to put a red couch in there, so we’ll see how that goes. And as I said yesterday, the family room will definitely be painted. So we’ll be busy.

The new as-of-today project is the laundry room.



There is old, old linoleum on the floor, scratched walls, and a huge, heavy cabinet without shelves. (That photo is hard for perspective, but that cabinet is more than two feet deep and no shelves.) Since we’ll be ordering a new washer and dryer, we both thought that this might be the time to do things from scratch. New vinyl floors, new paint, and perhaps two white 30” cabinets? The room is pretty minimal – 56” square, with two appliances and two doors, so we definitely want to make the best use of space possible.