Weekday Work

 Our stairway after the carpet was pulled up.

As I've mentioned earlier here we recently moved my mother out of our 1/2 upstairs to her own apartment.  Now that she is gone and the upstairs is empty it was time to start repairing the damage.  Not that my mother was wild and crazy and knocked holes in walls or anything, but she did own cats.  Yup, you guessed it, the carpet completely reeked of cat urine and it had to go before we could do anything else as we simply couldn't breath.  My wonderful husband volunteered himself for the job and spent Saturday and Sunday ripping and rolling carpet.  He stacked all the rolls in our garage to be doled out one at a time to our garbage can.  Luckily we do not make much garbage so there is plenty of room each week for a roll of carpet, and with the temps in the single digits at night it's cold enough to keep the smell down from the rolls left in the garage.  There is a lot of it to be sure, but not enough to warrant a dumpster and the extra expense.

My job came afterwards, that of prying up all the carpet tacking strips and pulling out all the carpet staples.  Not hard or taxing work, but fiddly and time consuming.  We probably could have reused the tacking strips I suppose, but we didn't want to risk having anything left that could possibly smell of urine (we are even taking up a few floor boards from the closet where my mom put their litter box.)  I've been spreading the work out over the course of the week as my hands have been getting sore in the process (I'm sure all the knitting I do has nothing to due with my hands aching.)  With only six stair treads left I'm hoping to finish today which is just in time for the weekend and a new set of repair jobs for us both.

Weekend Work & Our Start into Downsizing

 

Our storm windows in need of a little TLC.

Snow is supposedly coming to Minnesota today which meant a hustle yesterday to finish any outdoor work yet needing to be done.  Our house is old and still has it's original windows which means swapping out screens for storm windows.  Our storm windows are in need of major work - lots of glazing, sanding and painting.  We were hoping to get to it this summer, but with moving my mother out into her own apartment (she lived with us for the last five years) most of the summer was spent organizing her many, many things.  Her moving out really provided the opportunity for us to move ourselves and get us going on our downsizing goal.  

You see my mother is what I would call a mild hoarder.  When she moved from her large 3 bedroom ranch house to ours my husband filled a 40 foot dumpster with her junk and clutter as well as taking many, many trips to the dump (there was a 3 week timeline to get her out and moved so unfortunately much stuff went into a landfill instead of finding new homes.  It was pretty sad all around.)  But she still had lots of stuff left over and it came in a big plop into our house where she filled the upstairs and about 1/2 our basement with mounds of crazy stuff.  (my first curling iron from 1981 was down there along with 2 sets of hot rollers she hadn't used in decades.)  We felt hostage to all these things and they really kept us from clearing out our own excess stuff.  Heck, there was just no space to work in.  Then my mother would panic if I tried to get rid of anything and would "rescue" items I wanted to sell or donate by keeping them herself.  So, stuff got shuffled around, but not much really left the premises over the last 5 years.

Now, all her stuff is gone and her responsibility to deal with,  leaving us to finally deal with ours.  So, this weekend we put up all the windows even though they look pretty bad.  Dan did get to power washing them over the summer so most of the glazing and much of the paint is missing.  We hope to take them down one at a time and fix and paint them in our basement over the winter months (of which we have 6 here in MN.)  They really look too awful to leave until next summer, and my guess is we'd hear from the city if we did.  Now to find the space to work on them.  Hmm...back to the basement for me.