Work work work

[jamesq]

I spent a good chunk of Sunday cleaning and rearranging my garage (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was sold out). It's a chore I go through about twice a year. Once for myself, and once because I hold a garage sale once or twice a year.

Step one was getting rid of all the recycling. The downside to owning a garage is you can pile a lot of crap out of the way. My own sin is accumulating so much of it that it grows past what I can put into the car in a single trip. At that point I actively avoid it because who wants to spend a whole day shuttling back and forth from the neighborhood recycling bids (Cowtown doesn't have curbside recycling yet, at least where I live).

Luckily I have occasional access to devoidofthought's truck, so I managed to cut the car trips down. The downside is I loaded her truck up with just the cardboard today and I only got a little more then half of it. Tomorrow will be the other half, plus the tin and glass.

Three other things are pushing this:

First, I want to get all of kermie_canada and spookiemonkie2's crap out of my living room. To do that I need to be able to put it in my garage. On the bright side, I think I can store it all in two large columns, provided I repack it in several large totes.

Second, my sister is dropping a few big pieces of furniture off and I need to be able to put them somewhere. Half of it's going into the garage. Two of these pieces are an heirloom bureau and china cabinet. Both are things I've been looking at buying, so this allows me to put off a major purchase.

Third, If I can clean out the spare room I can rent it. I've been operating at a slight loss with the room rentals, so an extra roommate will fix that. devoidofthought knows someone looking for a room. And if that doesn't work out, at least the room will be ready for other potential roomies.

This all points to a problem I have, namely the fact that everyone and their dog is using my house to store there crap. Hell, I still have citagirl's piano. I need to start saying "no" and also getting former roomies to collect their stuff. Some already have plans to do so, so it's not like I'm really being taken advantage of. zapgun4hire is still in Scotland. kermie_canada and spookiemonkie2 are quasi-planning a trip out here in the next few months, so I expect at least a van-load's worth of their stuff gone. And of course, the piano should be gone in September.

So it's not as bad as it could be, but I'm still concerned that the place looks like a sty. It's making me think twice about inviting people over. At least my personal space is still pretty spartan.

What does bother me is the serial nature of the problem, because I've literally run out of staging areas to allow me options. I have to

• get rid of the recycling so that I can...
  
• move all the roommate's stuff out of the house so that I can...
  
• have room for the heirlooms and...
  
• clean out the spare room.

Ugh. It's going to take me about two weeks.

As you might have gathered, I'm going to having a garage sale soon. We'll actually it's Montengarde's garage sale as the proceeds will be going towards making Quad War profitable. It'll be July 19th. I'll be accepting donations starting July 1st.

Comments

[spookiemonkie2.livejournal.com]

We will be coming out in the last week of Aug.
And we should also be out their earlier than that provided the thesis ever gets edited. My trip out to defend my thesis should have been in early May but my prof has been taking 1-2 months to edit it. So I hope to be out there to defend in July some time.
Sooooo by Aug the stuff should have dropped a fair bit.

[devoidofthought.livejournal.com]

Oh, I talked to coworker. She said she'll probably be looking for July. Does that work for you?
I'll give you her contact info once I get it again, and you kids can meet up for coffee and all that jazz.

I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up with housecleaning on a regular basis. (I feel bad.)
On the upside, when I'm anxious as fuck, the house usually gets cleaned, starting with das room.