This week I spent a vacation week painting a wall in the living room, and cleaning the basement. The painting is done, the basement is still a work in process, and has generated an entire new set of projects. As they know around this house, beware anytime I start moving furniture — but we will save that teaser for later on in the blog.
I always tend to take a vacation week in June. Kansas City has a corporate challenge, and I take off the week of the swim meet. I am the company swim coordinator, and rather than stay up until midnight or later at the swim meet and then writing up the results four evenings in a row, I take vacation, so I can sleep in after coordinating the meet each evening.
So first the painting. Two years ago I also used my vacation week to paint the two short walls of our living room. It allowed me to push the furniture in from the ends and paint without having to clear the entire room. The living room was a dark burgundy with white trim, and we had chosen a light green with dark green trim. We had chosen the colors a couple three years before that, when we replaced all the external doors, and repainted the trim and short walls around the entry ways. I told Betsy if we still liked the color by the time I got ready to paint, we would know we had chosen an enduring color. And so it was.
Last year I didn’t get to paint — we took a Mediterranean cruise instead (see blogs on same). So this year I decided to paint one of the remaining long walls. I didn’t do two walls because I thought it would be too much for my time frame, and pushing the furniture in from both long walls wouldn’t give us any livable space while I was painting.
So per the pictures, you can see the transformation of one wall from dark burgundy to light green. Now we have three light green walls and one burgundy wall. But you can’t see much of the burgundy, we have so many bookcases and other things against it, though that should be changing soon (another teaser). The room became noticeably brighter two years ago, and is moderately brighter now — especially at night. When we turn on the lights in the evening it reflects off the light green walls a lot better than it did off the burgundy.
I slid furniture back and forth to paint the wall, but that isn’t the furniture I was warning about above. That furniture is actually related to cleaning the basement.
We had a big pile of stuff in the middle of the basement — junk and stuff we moved from elsewhere in the house that are part of intended donations that we never get to local thrift shops, etc. So I started working yesterday hacking at that pile. That led to collecting a lot of used and aged electronic equipment from around the house. Our little utility trailer is now loaded down with old laptops, desktop computer towers, big computer monitors, old printers, fax machines, etc., that we want to dispose of. I need to find a place to offer the stuff for people to come by and choose anything they want. I also need to find the right safe, “environmentally friendly” place to dispose of the rest of the other stuff.
I also have used paint, used propane tanks, etc., that I need to find safe places to dispose/recycle.
Also a part of the junk pile was a lot of papers we received/collected over the year, that we save to compact and burn in our pot belly stove during the winter. That reminded me of our upstairs office, where the rest of the papers have been collecting. We haven’t been using the office for an office — it has two cheap computer desks we picked up to put our desktop computers on — but we haven’t had/used desktop computers in a couple of years now, so the room had turned into our recycling center — a very cluttered recycling area.
My initial idea was to get the upstairs papers down with the basement papers, and get them packed/compressed together until the weather is cold enough to start burning again. Then I thought about moving those computer desks downstairs, and using them to create a new recycling center downstairs.
The office, now the office would become a library. Yes, why not? We have one really good desk in there, and we can move the two bookshelves from the living room into the new library — where they will be more accessible that the living room — since we put chairs in front of them currently.
So I got the pile cleared out of the basement, and Nathan helped me move the computer desks downstairs, and the new recycling center set up. I just need to clean/sort out all the shelves downstairs that were already there, and restack some items onto the shelves so everything is neatly stored.
So a busy week, a lot of good stuff done, and a lot more projects to do. Beware me when I start moving furniture.
At The Rainbow 