Spring Cleaning

Hello friends!  What a weekend!  John and I worked ourselves silly cleaning up the house.  I’ve never actually been one to partake in “Spring Cleaning”, but I guess there is a first time for everything right!  We didn’t even plan on doing it.  John took Friday off to help with Grandpa, since he has been having trouble keeping his balance, and moving long distances.  I mentioned in my last post that Grandpa had a Dr.’s appointment to find out what was going on with him.  Well, the good news is that it isn’t his heart as we suspected, but the bad new is that he’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  That’s why he’s been scooting around instead of picking up his feet, and why sometimes he just sits instead of taking action.  We thought it was all symptoms of his Dementia, so it’s good to know that maybe that hasn’t progressed as much as we thought.

Well, Grandpa was visiting this weekend, and since I always seem to have a big project going on for him to watch, and entertain him with, I must have subconsciously created this new big project.  Cleaning out our garage!  (“Psycho” theme plays!)  Over the last year or two we’ve slowly turned out garage into a huge storage shed of holiday décor and random junk.  It got so out of control that John hasn’t parked his car inside of it in over a year!  Side note; I don’t park in garages.  I have a terrible time backing out of them.  Haha!  It really got out of control when I used the garage as my workshop, when I was building our family room built-ins.  Since then we just haven’t had the time, opportunity, or want, to actually clean it all up.  Like I said, I must have wanted to entertain Grandpa with a big project because I walked into the garage for some unknown reason on Friday, and just started moving things around.  I called for John to come out and help me, and within a couple of hours you could see that we were making a good dent in the project.  Of course as much as we worked one would have assumed it was completely done, but that wasn’t the case.  We decided to tackle some other projects, and then relax for the rest of the day.

On Saturday morning we headed back into the garage, and before noon it was all cleaned up.  We have a huge pile of “garage sale” items, as well as a few items going up on our local Facebook Garage Sale, so the room isn’t completely cleared out, but it’s still amazing to look out and see cement floors!  You couldn’t before we started.  We hope to have that all cleared out in the next couple of months, and to be able to use it as parking again.  It’ll be so nice!  Well, it’ll be so nice for John!

Cleaning the garage led me to cleaning up our pantry.  Here’s a quick fact about how we chose our home.  We actually based the purchase of our home on the pantry size.  We fell in love with two different floor plans when building, but picked this one over the other because the pantry was almost non-existent on the other floor plan, and this one had a huge walk-in pantry.  I’m not sure what the architect was thinking when designing that other floor plan.  It’s actually a larger floor plan than the one chose, so I assume that would mean the possibility of more people living inside of it, requiring more food, and more storage space for said food.  Okay, I’m going to stop now.  Haha!  Anyhow, I ended up cleaning the pantry out so well that I have two whole shelves that are sitting empty.  I’m trying to figure out exactly how I want to utilize this new-found space.  I’m thinking maybe a mini “family station” since we tend to drop our mail and such on the kitchen counters.  Maybe moving all of that to the pantry would be nice, and keep it out of sight.

Maybe one day the two spaces will be photo worthy, but honestly, they look like any other garage, and pantry, so I didn’t take any pictures of them as they are today.  If I happen to turn our newfound space in the pantry into a family station, I’ll upload some pictures then.

A few things I will be sharing from this weekend’s escapades, are our updated back porch, new molding in the powder room, and our Easter tablescape.  Look for that one to be shared either tomorrow or Wednesday.

Thanks for stopping by and listening to me ramble on about my weekend! 🙂 ~Iris