The process of sorting, weeding out, burning, and donating continues.  We had quite a bit of time on Thursday, Friday and today, Saturday to work on this project.  We also had several people help us out this week, and we are very thankful.

On Thursday, we focused on the basement.  It consists of 3 small rooms.  It is musty, full of spiderwebs, and molds easily.  The first room has some old carpet in it, but the other rooms are rocks and stone with a little concrete poured down in places.  The original house was built in 1925, so I call this my “Nancy Drew” basement.   I keep my canning down there.  There were also things like old water coolers, an old clarinet, old fishbowls, Christmas decorations that were no longer used….and so forth.  There was a place where one of the children started putting dahlia bulbs in peat moss and then decided to stop, leaving a huge bunch of screens, peat moss, etc.  There were lots of cardboard boxes and other debris from the years.  This is a picture of the first room, with all of the empty jar removed.  We cleaned that room entirely, and packed up all of the empties.  Then, I moved the full jars from the second room into this room and filled the shelves.  The second room is now mostly empty.  There is a 3rd, super small room that holds the water heater, and a little area where previous owners kept their canning.  It won’t be very hard to clean out.

On the opposite side of the room, that you can’t see in the picture, we put a pallet for cardboard boxes of empty jars.  We also started bringing bins down and stacking them to the ceiling.  The bins are filled with things that will go into storage, and putting them down there buys us a little more time before we need to rent a unit and opens up more space in the house to look better for showing it.

By Thursday afternoon, the basement was about 80% finished.

On Friday morning, very early, 2 young men came over.  They took all of this trash, plus more down to the burn pile.  It was from the basement and other places.  They climbed up into the attic above the garage, and hauled everything down.  My garage table was full, and the garage itself was full to the brim.  I could hardly walk, and actually felt so overwhelmed, it was not good, because we have so many empty boxes in there right now.  BUT, those wonderful young men took many of those bins from the attic right down to the basement (things like Christmas decorations that I had put up there the way I wanted them) and I started going through the other boxes. They took more bins that were ready to go as well, and it started to clear out.  Rob set them to work taking  more unwanted items out of the basement and other places and putting them into the van to donate. My mom and aunt showed up, and started helping clean and sort.  The boys took off, having given us as much time as they could, and Rob loaded up the rest of the van for the charity thrift shop and took off with it.  By the end of Friday, the garage was navigable, and more items in the house were packed or donated.

This morning, another crew of men, including my nephew, showed up at 7 am to work on moving some of Rob’s shop to storage at my sister’s house in an old semi truck trailer that they have.  They got 2 entire trailer loads over there.  Rob had them help load another bunch of un-needed stuff into the van and I finished filling it up and he took it off and donated it this afternoon.  I worked with Lovana on several boxes of her things, and they are taken care of.  Lovana and Ja’Anas’ rooms are both very close to being ready to show.  Patsy’s is not.  My friend Tamara and her son Cameron came over for several hours and we worked on the school room some more, and Cameron put sleeping bags into protective bags and carried them and a few more bins down to the basement.  The schoolroom was a huge task, due to having so much stuff from so many years of homeschooling.  It is getting close, and I have 4 more boxes to take and try to sell at the used book store.

The front room is finished.  I just need to keep it looking good, floors swept, etc.  I have much to do, still, but we are making huge amounts of progress every week.  We hope to have it ready to list within the next week or two.  We have a bunch of people who want to help in a couple of weeks.  We will probably have them do some yard work and a little painting.  I cannot express how grateful we are for all of the people who are helping out.  Although I do feel overwhelmed at times, I am actually feeling pretty good about the amount of things I am getting rid of, but am starting to wonder if I am still keeping too much.  When you see the stack of bins and think about how much more you still have……it’s kind of sobering.  I figure I’m letting at least 1/2 of my things go–I guess time will tell if that’s enough.