Ahhhh… How good Clean feels

Determined to start the new work year off with a reasonably clean, less chaotic environment, I’ve worked and worked and worked the past couple of weeks, only stopping Christmas Day and New Year’s Day for a break. The back room of the shop has never been organized. Oh, I’ve pushed a path a few times, but never took the time to really place and organize and it was the catch-all. Do you do that? Hopefully not to the extent I do. A table top or counter isn’t so bad, but when you keep piling things in a space, piling stuff on top of stuff, shoving into every little crevice, never taking the time to find or make a place for it, it begins to look like this:

And when you’ve boxed up household overflow and the kids’ toys they say “don’t get rid of this, but I don’t have room for it” — OK. I’ll admit to being one of the main ones hanging onto their childhood, but I know what it’s like to get a little older and to have to buy back your toys. Anyway to box all that crap up and stack boxes of things waiting to be offered for sale in front of those stacks, it begins to look like this blurry mess  :

After two solid weeks of back breaking, exhausting work, literally skipping Christmas festivities, I’ve ended up with this:

Still not perfect, it’ll never be in Where Women Create, but oh, so much better! The shades on the sofa will be made into hanging lights and I want to use the cornices at home, but in the meantime, the cornices stay at the shop awaiting being hung from the ceiling somehow since they’re too tall to stand. Just to the left, almost out of the picture is a teetering tower of boxes slated for a yard sale.

I (Actually Ricky helped with this one thing) moved the household and kids’ boxes to the far back corner, as you look straight on in the above picture, to free up that space and make a more efficient computer work station for me. I’m most excited about this achievement.

I’m so ready to get back to work! There are just a few more things to do today. I took pictures of the things I pulled out of the back, but don’t know what happened to them. They’re lost. Gone. The pictures, that is. Most of the stuff is worked out into the shop already, but there’s this couch…. Later on that. Someone brought me a mantle the other day that I’ll have to figure out where to put and there’s this little problem of mice. Yes, mice!

We’ve been seeing them off and on for several months now, but yesterday they were out and busy. The business next door has been remodeling and I think that has them stirred up. I was willing to co-exist with the little fellows. I’m so tenderhearted, I scoop up spiders on paper or something large and take them outside. I won’t even step on a roach. Yech! So I really didn’t want to kill these little guys. Lisa said kill ‘em, but I couldn’t do it. But yesterday, as I sat in the front setting up the laptop there, I felt something tickling the front of my ankle. When I moved my foot, the mouse shot across the room away from me!! He was going to crawl up my pants leg!!!!!

I went home and got my cat. She spent the rest of the day with me, but never saw the mice. I saw them, but she was too curious about the mess. So, traps it will be. I hate it, but people have been telling me how fast they breed and we’ll be overrun if we’re not careful. There seem to be only two, but I’ve got a feeling there are many more. More on that later, too.

Hope the new year is healthy and prosperous for us all!

• 5 fabulous junking friends have chatted.