It's Getting There...

Entry 17.8.10

I Declare It-Okay, Nearly Clean!

You recall me telling you about the Horrid Confines of the dreaded Shop. This room was the dirty little secret of our house. The room we never entered. A place where the skeletons sat in quiet repose on the seat of a dead-as-doorknobs 1966 green Ford that had more rust than truck, surrounded by garbage and boards and sheetrock and vinyl paneling and fiberglass insulation and bags of cement and a dartboard and a pool table and a couch and a broken rifle and sawdust an inch deep and…well, I think by now that you’ve gotten the picture.

Well, the truck is two weeks gone to demolition derby heaven.

The sheetrock is being smashed into smithereens by a bunch of small but angry women. Give my mother a hammer and watch the gypsum dust fly…

The boards have been removed from the premises.

The sawdust has been swept up.

As of today, we have reached every corner with a broom. There’s still some sheetrock to contend with, but my sisters and I have assured our mother it won’t last long under the assaults of a hammer and three young women who are completely fed up with the mess.

Today I walked from the garage door at one end to the wall at the other end and didn’t stop to step over ANYTHING.

My father’s last bastion of mess is falling to our small but determined army.

Of course, we haven’t told HIM anything at all. He doesn’t even know about the truck yet. He has no idea how much progress we’ve made. If he were able to peek into the windows of that room now, he would probably see the wall on the other side and nothing else in between. We aren’t going to tell him until the insulation guys get here to finish the room (half the insulation got put in 25 years ago and the rest was thrown in various directions. We took the insulation to the dump because it was past the point of useful and on the far side of annoying.)

Oh, won’t HE been surprised when he walks in there and finds everything long gone save a few small objects, the pool table, the broken saw that doesn’t work, and the couch and dartboard. That’s about it.

We are planning to break open a bottle of sparkling wine (Anna can’t drink till two weeks from now, Sara another year and a half) and we’re going to have a nice big lunch to celebrate our victory over The High and Mighty Shop Room Full of Crap.

To tell you the truth, I thought I would never see this day. The hundred times I walked up to that room, determined to clean…and then I’d see the mess and go, “It’s too much, I can’t do this alone, forget it.”

Even on Day 2 of the cleaning, I looked up the piles, I looked up at the cobwebs and the mess and said, “There is absolutely no way we can do this in three months. None.” I remember the feeling I had when I was looking at it that day. My heart was somewhere around my shoes. I got depressed and went back upstairs because I could not look at it one more second without tears.

But NOW! We’re talking mopping (!!!), something that would NOT have been a possibility up until two weeks ago. We’re talking making it a game room…a USEFUL room.

There are no words to express it-not yet. I think when we’re done smashing sheetrock, then I might celebrate a bit more.

Entry-18.8.10

The sheetrock is pretty much gone, save for a few small chunks that are in a couple of buckets, bags, and boxes waiting to go out tomorrow sometime. There were 15 huge sheets against the side wall and they were all coated in mold from years of sitting in a damp room, so they had to be smashed down to a size we could carry and loaded into the back of my mother’s car. Of course, the stuff is really just pressed gypsum dust so it crumbles all over the place, and then people step on it and it smears and streaks all over the floor. Eventually when we finished loading the big pieces, the back of the car was covered in dust, the ground had spots of the stuff, and of course the cement was coated in it. Bigger chunks had to be picked up and put into something to be carried out. The rest was swept up.

How we managed to smash the hell out of 15 heavy sheets of sheetrock and remove them from that room I will never know. But my extremely sore muscles are attesting to how fast we did it.

Tomorrow sometime, the last stuff will be taken out and sent to the dump. We might set up the pool table and see if it stands (we decided that if it’s too warped to stand independently we’re going to have to go at it with a hatchet or something and smash it to bits. If it don’t work, it goes.) The floor and walls need to be washed down with a mixture of bleach and water (to get rid of the last of the mold.) And then we should be able to declare this whole stupid insane project done. And my sister is determined to get the woodrack up above cleared of the pieces that are sitting up there because she feels the shelf isn’t stable enough for anyone to safely install insulation without taking the whole thing down with them. And then there’s the window that needs cleaning…

We could probably go at it like we did today for about two to three more days and finish most if not all of the things I just listed. But I may need a week to recover the strength in my arms from all the stuff I did today.

So, extremely tired and not feeling much like celebrating because every time we finish one big project, another looms on the horizon. Are we ever going to be DONE???

Entry 19.8.10

Well, we didn’t go to the dump today, so that stuff’s waiting until we have more of a load to take with us.

BUT we got the floor and walls bleached down save for the spot up above the woodrack, which will probably get done tomorrow. (I can tell you, the smell of mold has definitely been taken down several notches in that room thanks to the bleach.)The window is clean, too. And the pool table is standing very well on its own two legs, so it’s going to stay (we cleaned that, too.) Hopefully, tomorrow we’ll take a load to the dump, get a broom up to the ceiling to get the last of the cobwebs down, take the wood out and stash it wherever Mom and Anna are planning on stashing it, wash the last bit of cement down with bleach, and then, AAAAND THEN…we can declare the room clean.

And then we can get Mom’s car cleaned out because she’s got sheetrock still streaked all over the place in there.

Entry 20.8.10

The stuff went to the dump.

The entire woodrack has pretty much been destroyed (the minute we pulled the last of the wood off, the whole damn thing pretty much did what we’d expected and fell down.) The wood is piled into Keep-that of valuable oak pieces that are worth A LOT and stuff that’s just crap and should go. If you’ve never seen determination, enter Exhibit A: My mother with a table saw today on the cement and kneeling on a sample piece of tile, balancing a long bit of wood on two tires to the sides of her, cutting the wood to pieces so it can be junked or thrown onto the pile on the trailer. That wood never stood a chance.

I also tried to get a broom up at the ceiling (not real successful there) and Anna bleached the last bit of wall.

The valuable wood is going to be moved to the van tomorrow and the junky stuff will be cut up and put where it can be useful.

This whole thing is very tiring and exacting on us. We aren’t big, strong people and we’re managing with what we’ve got. But we’ve got so much done that we’re probably going to kill ourselves trying to get the last parts completed.

21.8.10

Change of plans-the valuable wood don't fit in the van. I have a new spot where I think it will fit but it means about another day worth of work that I am not really feeling like putting in.

Why can't anything ever be EASY?

22.8.10

I will keep updating the progress on our big secret project as we go. There won't be much getting done this week unless Mom can get Dad out of here and into a car on vacation for a couple of days.