Much to our astonishment, our daughter decided to start fixing up the house. One notorious area involved the second-floor landing. There was a whole bunch of miscellaneous crap, and iterations of it have been there for years.
My wife and I decided someday we ought to do something about it. Well, our daughter decided that “someday” had arrived in January. But she wasn’t going to do it alone. While my wife was at a work training event on a Saturday, my daughter and I went through everything, item by item, and sorted, shredded, and tossed.
Within about an hour, we got it down to one big container, which turned out to be her books and other childhood items. It was so heavy that even she couldn’t carry it up the stairs – and she is quite strong. So she got three boxes, separated the items, and we carried them up to the attic.
There’s a space that was designated for her stuff. Of course, we had to rearrange the attic well enough to GET to the space. The Christmas stuff had not been put away from Christmas 2024, so we had to tackle those items first.
The landing is not empty, though. It has a basket full of reusable bags I utilize for trash, a small bookcase for my oversized books, the vacuum cleaner, and a spot for Stormy to hang out. But it’s tidy.
My office
I had started cleaning my office in September, and, actually, it was a whole lot better than it had been, but not up to her standards. We spent an extraordinary amount of time sorting things into various bins. I was exhausted by the end of it, but not only did it look a whole lot better, but I also found things that I had been missing.
Moreover, she decided to hang the pictures that had been sitting in our living room downstairs. There was a stack of framed items against the wall near the television. It was really boring to see them because they’d been there seemingly forever.
A couple items we got for our wedding 26 years ago. Back in 2012, my wife said we should paint the living room walls, then put up some pictures. The painting happened, but the pictures never got put up then.
The daughter decided to rectify this, and not just in the living room, but also in the hallways, and notably in my office. One of them was a picture I bought: Chuck Miller’s 2020 photograph, Washington County, 2:30 a.m., still in its packaging. It’s up with my Lennon photo c. 1972, and a Beach Boys photo that I received when I retired in 2019.
The painting, The Bookworm, I got from my late father-in-law’s belongings. I didn’t realize the joy of having stuff on my walls.