Posts Tagged ‘Cleaning’

Rollin’… rollin’… rollin’…

Sunday, September 7th, 2014

Quick note: I’m not a hoarder, this is what moving looks like. This is also a graphics heavy post.

In the deep recess of my mind I will always have the “I need to sit down and get this done” mentality. The reality of that, however, it just doesn’t freaking happen. I’ve deleted five posts that were sitting in drafts over the course of the past few months. I’m to a point in my life where I’m really just too bored with things to even care about them. I always find a way to side track myself just to get away from the task at hand. This is killing me on all levels because I feel like I don’t actually complete anything from start to finish in the usual time frame.

Last month Sean and I headed up to New York because he had an appointment in Manhattan, and we hadn’t been up there in well over a year so we were doing double-duty on this trip by getting my childhood bedroom packed up so we could move everything into the house. I wanted to get up there earlier, but I also wanted to get the new house settled a little bit before there would be complete and total chaos with new stuff. I’m actually happy I did it this way because the end result of unloading the truck into the living room put my OCD about keeping things clean into a tail spin.

As you can see from the photo below, the living room and dining room were covered in boxes and bags and just fabric everywhere. It took me a solid 3 days to get everything where it was supposed to go.  Literally, three days, 8-10 hour days a piece. Books were put on the shelves, furniture was moved to the rooms they actually belonged in, DVD’s and Games were put away, shelves were hung in the hall closet to accommodate the extra jackets, winter gear, and even board games (that I had no idea I had a stock-pile of) and then all of the clothes somehow wound up inside of MY closet. This is primarily because it’s a 8-foot by 8-foot room and there was enough space on the floor, and enough height with the shelves that I could actually get the boxes into the shelves.

cleanhouse

So this is ultimately how the house looked after a solid 3 days of busting my ass. And even though the mess of stuff didn’t actually wind up in the den initially, since I was on a cleaning rampage anyway – I went a head and not only rearranged the furniture in the den, but cleaned and organized it from top to bottom as well.

den

Bella now has her own little corner by the doors, I needed this to happen because I wasn’t able to close the glass doors with the way the furniture previously was formatted. So I had to move Sean to his own corner, which works out better for him because it’s right in front of the TV. Not many people believe that it’s a 70-inch television, but it is and it just looks super small up against the huge wall it’s on.

The closet was a different story.  I think since it’s in an area that doesn’t get a lot of daily foot traffic, I was able to keep it at the back of my mind… as well as at the back of the house. I had no ability to even really access the closet, because three weeks of laundry kind of piled up in front of it. Of course, after the laundry was done I still couldn’t get towards the shelves because of everything on the floor inside of the closet that needed to be sorted through and thrown away.  In the end, however, the final result makes me very happy. Note: The bathroom and closet are not green, they’re white…for some reason the tablet is randomly changing things to different colors.

closet

Another area we’re tackling is the kitchen.  I’ve been fairly unhappy with it since we moved in. The location of the island really cut down the proper use of the counter space. So, what we did was get rid of the island. Does this sound crazy? Sure, but we turned the island so that it is up against the wall instead of coming out from the wall. We then purchased two upper cabinets to hang above it, and cut the depth of the counter top so there is no longer the ability to put the barstools up against it. This isn’t something I’m worried about though, what we’re going to be doing on the other side of the kitchen is opening up the wall to have a picture window (that will allow for more light in the Living Room), we’ll be purchasing two lower cabinets to flank on either side of the bar stools that will now overlook the living room and fireplace. This area will more than likely be used for quick meals, or going through the mail, or just sitting down and having a cup of coffee.  Maybe if Sean and I ever decide that we’re ready for children this could eventually turn into a homework space. I don’t know… I just know that by opening things up into the Living Room/Dining Room it’ll just make the kitchen feel larger than it actually is.  In order to do the walls, however, I’ll have already needed to have countertops ready to go.  We’re replacing the butcher block look formica with a slate black color, I’ll need to purchase two counter tops to replace the existing ones, and then an additional one to put against the new wall. I’ll be painting all the cabinets white, putting in new flooring, and going with a grey tone on the walls.  I’ll have pictures of that in an upcoming post, this one was a little picture heavy and I’m personally not 100% happy with how the kitchen currently looks so obviously there’s nothing to show.

In any event, I actually finally sat down and got everything in my head written down. I am going to try for more posts, lord knows there’s enough going on that I want to blog about but at least for now the “I finally have 30 years of my life under ONE roof” post is finally complete.

We’re getting there…

Monday, May 12th, 2014

I’ve wanted to actually sit down and post for well over a month and a half, but the joy of homeownership when the place is constantly a wreck tends to take the priority.  So, since it’s been so long, I now don’t even know where to start.

If you follow me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook you’d know that we did actually close on the house and get the keys, it happened on March 14th instead of March 12th but it happened. Since then it’s been a mad-dash of “Get This”, “Fix This”, “Clean This”, followed by INSERT MORE COFFEE!!  The house was so freaking disgusting after we got here on closing day. It took me over a week of shampooing carpets before I was even remotely comfortable with moving in my stuff over here. The bathrooms were scrubbed a few times with A LOT of bleach, the garage was full of crap that the previous owners should have gotten rid of and it fucking cost us money to do it, money we didn’t have because they completely fucking screwed us during this entire god damn process.  After going through this house we’ve easily determined that these people were low-life scum who had absolutely no idea what broom was, let alone any advanced cleaning accessory such as a SPONGE. The layers of slime that were scrubbed off of the showers is still mind-blowing to me… to the point that I’m now scrubbing the shower down almost every day just to make sure there’s none of their residue making an appearance – my O.C.D. in this house is possibly 10 times worse than it’s ever been before.  I swear to god if they were ever dumb enough to step foot on this property I’d probably shove a few of the shot-gun shells found in our crawl space straight up their asses.

In the past month we’ve gotten the bare essentials taken care of on the house, the rest are all happening this summer. We’ve got a huge couch and a big comfy chair (for Sean) in the Den. We recently picked up a gorgeous 6-person cherry dining table to start building up the dining room, we bought a small kitchen table the first week so we had somewhere to eat, picked up some bar stools on clearance from Lowes that were a really good find. George and Sean have been busy with some of the maintenance around the house so that we can be in a livable environment, and the only major thing left to accomplish this upcoming summer is to get the roof patched up.  If we had a little more wiggle room with the bank account this summer we’d have a company come in to take down a few of the over-grown (and dying) trees in the back yard so we can start putting in posts for a fence.  Why? Cause the neighbor behind us has the most annoying dog in the world and I’d rather it no longer have the ability to see us whenever we pass by one of our windows, and I want a damn pool so a fence must come first!

Sean’s been really happy down in his basement office, I was able to spend some time getting my office painted and setup so the only thing at this point that’s missing is a new desk but I’m making due with the folding table for now, it’s holding the iMac up pretty well, as well as the side monitor so I think I’ll be OK for a little while. Of course I’m going to need to get my Windows desktop setup at some point for cross-browser testing but I’ll continue to utilize the free services for now.  I could really care less if IE6 supports something anyway, if you’re still using IE6 then you shouldn’t have a computer to begin with.

The one big draw-back for life recently is the fact that my cell-phone is pretty much useless. I dropped it on the day of closing and the back popped off, it’s currently being held together with electrical tape and the battery only holds a charge for about 30-60 minutes. I literally have to keep it on the charger unless I’m talking on it, in which case I have to make sure there’s a charger close by.  Now, the battery was shit before I broke the back off of the phone, it’s just gotten much worse over time so I’m going to assume that replacing it should help to solve a few of my problems.  Thankfully, even though the Droid-4 was made in a way that Verizon would have to change the battery for you, I was able to break the piece off that Verizon has the tool for and I don’t need to waste money by bringing anything to them.  So, I’m gonna spend $20 on Amazon for a replacement and hopefully be good to go. I’m not due for an upgrade, but with the cost of cellphones I’d rather salvage the one I have for as long as humanly possible.  There’s no point in my spending $200 to upgrade every two years when I can just pick up a $20 battery that should hopefully give me at least 12 months without any problems.

BUT – the one thing we’re doing to help with the problem is turning our Double Play with Comcast into a Triple Play. Sean didn’t really see the point in having a house phone in the beginning, but now that he’s seeing how many problems I’m having with my phone and seeing how often I need to be ON the phone because my entire family and all of my friends live in NY he’s realizing that the house phone will be an essential part of life here for me. So tonight while we were in Staples we found an AT&T phone system for like $100 that included like 5 phones which would pretty much cover every room in the house, Sean figured it would be cheaper on Amazon so we walked away from it, but I saw saw it for like $130 on Amazon so I guess I’ll be heading back to Staples… when will men learn to listen?

In any event, I have an inbox full of crap to take care of and eyelids that are not willing to cooperate, so it’s time to increase my caffeine and while that’s working through my system it’s time to walk the dog. If it weren’t for her snoring next to me, I honestly would have completely forgotten it’s time for her to head around the block.

We’re almost there!!

Tuesday, March 11th, 2014

It’s been a constant up and down, and I know I’ve bitched about it quite a bit but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  We’re closing on Wednesday 3/12 at 4pm.  I’m excited, but not to the point where I’m jumping up and down.  I’m so over this entire process that I just want my keys and the current owners to fuck off and then I can just work on making it OUR home.

We’re doing the final walk through today (3/11), it’s odd to do it the day before the closing, but we’re obligated to get another pest inspection (per banks request) and since we need to be there for that we’re just going to get that over with today.  They supposedly turned the electric back on, but we’re still not sure as to whether or not the water is on in the home. This is an area where I’m a little freaked out based on the fact that we’ve had such cold weather in a home with no heat that even with an enclosed basement there’s still the issue of having some type of a pipe blow up.  Even though I’m sure there’s some law telling us not to, if the water isn’t on in the home today I’m going to locate the main at the back of the house and turn it on.  They were morons for shutting everything down in the first place, if a pipe bursts it’s on them.

Our other focus is the attic, we know that there were a few leaks and it’s an area we need to address almost immediately, but since we had the house inspected more and more shingles have come off of the roof, leaving other areas exposed. We have every intent of redoing the roof, or just patching until we can afford the complete gut job that it really needs. I just want to make sure that more and more water hasn’t shown up to the point that there’s discoloration on the ceilings. Nipping it in the bud ASAP is our only option.

Everything else is minor cosmetic shit, and primarily stuff that would just need to be cleaned / painted. Thankfully, for the most part, the house is white so I don’t really have to worry about throwing paint on the walls right away. My focus is just getting all of the cleaning supplies together so I can get in there and do my thing. I probably won’t be thrilled about being a homeowner until everything is in and settled.  We have furniture to purchase, cleaning supplies to purchase, we’ve already got a good chunk of the kitchen necessities already purchased. I figured when I get over to the discount stores to start stocking up on cleaning supplies, I’ll pick up a few plates/cups/bowls to hold us over until I can get up to NY to pick up the rest of my belongings.  It’s just going to be a LONG drawn out process but by this time next month I’ll be able to sit down and really just take it all in.

We’ll be in the house long before then, but it’s going to be complete chaos until we can get everything put away and organized. Thankfully we’ve got so little to start with that it won’t take long to get everything to the spots it needs to go. I think the most complicated aspects of moving, for us, is based solely on electronics. Laptops, Desktops, iMacs, TV’s, Game Consoles…. which is primarily everything in Sean’s office.   I’m worried that my desk won’t survive the move, but that’s because the top isn’t really secured to the base. This could mean that moving it around would be easier since I’ll have the drawers out and the top off of it, but I hope it can be properly re-secured when we get it into the house. I don’t need the 27″ iMac falling through to the floor, that’s just too much damn money to have to shell out when it can go to more important places – like the roof.

Sean and I have done some shopping around, and have found some furniture that we’re interested in but it seems that wherever we go we wind up finding something for cheaper.  I found a couch in Furniture & More that I thought would be perfect for the Living Room, it was $499, I could get it with a queen sleeper for $699. Now, I know that seems really inexpensive for a couch but you have to remember with the huge den in the back of the house we don’t have the need for a sofa that’s going to get a lot of wear and tear. With that said, I was happy when I found a couch in Big Lots (of all places) for $360 that was both comfortable but in a color tone that I actually liked. I didn’t have to customize a damn thing and as long as I’ve got a uHaul I could just take it home.  I downright refuse to purchase any type of Sofa from a thrift shop, even though a good chunk of my furniture will be purchased from one. There are just certain things that you can wash and disinfect, and then there’s other things – like a couch – that just can’t fit into the washing machine to make it worth it for me.  BUT that’s the only thing I’m buying NEW so my being picky about it won’t ultimately kill our wallets in the end.

So yea… we’re FINALLY closing on this thing and there’s A LOT to do. I haven’t really been sleeping very well, but I think the stress is playing a part in that. I woke up around 5am, couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed until 7am and now 3 hours later I’m still going through emails and everything on my computer just to keep my brain functioning.  I’m gonna hop in the shower and head out to run some errands, we’re meeting with the pest control company around 4pm at the house so anything that I wanted to accomplish today will have to be done by 3:30. Good thing it’s not very much… I still wish I’d had enough drive to leave the house before 10am though.. I was oddly enough in the mood for breakfast from McDonalds today. Nutri-Grain just didn’t fill that void, but at least there’s something in my stomach to get me moving.

Productive as shit…

Sunday, January 12th, 2014

My sleep schedule has been completely messed up. I’ve been waking up between 7pm and 8pm consecutively for the past week. Being under the weather didn’t really help the situation but there was really nothing I could do about it.  Last night, however, for some reason I completely passed out at about 3am. Surprising to me, of course, considering I’ve been going to bed around noon for a while.  I woke up at 6am, refreshed as all holy hell and could not get back to sleep.  So I basically said “screw it, I’ll just get up” and my day hasn’t freaking stopped.

I finished a HTML to WP conversion, I took down all of the Christmas crap, did 5 loads of laundry and vacuumed the house.  I still need to do the dishes and get the kitchen cleaned up but I just finished closing out all of my email and backing out of databases and I’m a good five minutes from completely falling asleep in this chair.  It’s not even a comfortable chair, that’s when I know I’m dead-ass tired.

I’m hoping to hold on long enough for the dryer to stop so I can at least shift the loads around. If I can get the last one into the dryer then it doesn’t really matter when I pass out… I just don’t like the idea of clothes sitting in the washing machine over night. I just feel like they get moldy faster than one would think.

I’m about to chug some coffee just to hold me over for a little while. :: massive yawn ::

Too Hot!

Monday, May 30th, 2011

It’s memorial day, parades and barbeques are taking place everywhere across the US. Unfortunately for those of us in the northeast, we’re all sweating our asses off! Today is a very sticky 85° and it’s NOT a good time. I woke up freezing this morning because the AC is right next to my head. I thawed out almost instantly when going outside. It shouldn’t be in the 80’s at 9am but I guess that’s how things go.

I took a little trip to Walgreens this morning, the cat decided to destroy my brand new flipflops by using them as a scratching post while I was asleep last night. I did NOT appreciate that at all but really didn’t appreciate the fact that they no longer had the same pair, even though I’d seen a whole rack of them two days ago. I didn’t like any of the other ones either. Again, not a good time.

While browsing around the store I picked up a 10 pack of solar lights for my aunts house, they were on sale for $10, I couldn’t pass that up. The front of her house is hit with beautiful sunshine all day long but at night you wouldn’t even know the house was here without the driveway light being on. So, I picked them up and spread them out in the front yard. Thankfully they’re getting a full 9 hours of sun so hopefully they’ll be nice and lit up tonight so I can see how everything is going to look, the spacing, and can adjust things from there. It should be at least 10 to 15 degrees cooler tonight so I’ll be able to tolerate being outside for a little while, instead of dripping with sweat like I was when setting everything up. I was hardly moving, it’s just way too damn hot.

After the little bit of dressing up in the yard I made lunch for my uncle and then conquered the dishes in the sink that I was too tired to take care of last night. Of course it’s never simple for me, I was getting a little sick of the stuff piling up on the counter so I wound up just completely cleaning up the kitchen, scrubbing the counters and clearing some of the dust out. It’s not my house but considering I’ve been here for the last four days I finally had enough and just went ahead and cleaned everything.  Once I’ve gotten some rest (I am still dealing with a cold afterall), I’m going to tackle the bathroom.

It was my ultimate goal to sit down today and just complete the new template, I just have so many areas to focus on I honestly have no idea how to even begin to tackle it. I should probably just roll through the categories but even there I don’t know where to start.  The one thing that I always was good with at work was my problem solving. I think the fever has officially screwed with my brain.  Starting on Wednesday I’m going to create a daily to-do list.  Why Wednesday? Because it’s my first official “I can do this now” day. Tuesday is the get my shit together and go home day.  Wednesday at 9am will be the start date/time and I’ll go from there.

Time to lay down for a few minutes and then tackle that bathroom.

The Goals…continued

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

So there was a bit of a bump in the road last night that I certainly wasn’t expecting.  The ideas that I had for organization and shelving were a bust because of the size of the space located directly next to my desk.  The shelves we have on that side now are hanging over on the top of the hutch on the desk so it’s really not a wise choice to add more shelving below because that would require cutting compressed wood and that’s just never pretty.  So, instead we’re figuring out what to do with all of the other sections.

Our first step – the closet!  Sean is going through all of his clothes and seeing what he can throw out and what can be compressed down into a vacuum bag.  He really doesn’t wear all of the clothes he has and if he does it’s typically something he’ll wear seasonally (ie – the jackets) so he’s working on his side and I’ll go in and begin working on my side as well.

Instead of getting rid of the dresser I’m just going to better organize the one we have.  It would be great if I could find a taller one with just one more drawer in it but since that’s not going to happen there’s really nothing I can do about it (IKEA & Walmart were also a bust for shelving/cases).  I want to figure out a way to get the bucket-o-pajamas into another section of the room.  I’m thinking of a box under the bed or compressing the seasonal ones (you don’t need heavy fleece pants in the summer).  So that will cover that section.

Our desk is horrible.  It’s poorly organized and I was lucky enough to find some small low-profile bins to put on the shelves so that will instantly clean things up and that’s always a great thing for me.

So yea, it’s really not a matter of cleaning things up it’s just a matter of organizing things better.  The ultimate goal is to get all of our stuff out of the tub but I imagine with a new bed that’s higher off the ground I’ll just be able to fit the bins underneath and that will clean up a lot of the clutter.  So basically find a hidden hole and stick it in (but label it first) HA.

The Goals

Friday, April 17th, 2009

I haven’t really had the ability to sit down and work on anything for myself lately.  This weekend is going to change all of that as some kind of a design bug has bitten me and I have the itch to get a lot accomplished.

My ultimate goal for the weekend is to get everything in the bedroom 100% organized.  I intend to go to Home Depot and pick up the shelves that I need and I also intend to get myself over to Walmart to pick up the storage containers that I need as well.  Why? Because over the course of the next week I’ll be purchasing a larger bed so we can get Sean off of the floor and the organization will just seal the deal so we’ll actually have room to move around.  The closet will be organized, everything storage wise will be taken care of, a lot of junk will be thrown out and I’m even going to organize all the paperwork that is just kind of floating around the room.  It’s been a difficult transition when it comes to moving two rooms into one and while we’re using the bathroom for a lot of over-sized storage, I would ultimately like to even break that down quite a bit.  We can’t really use the shower anyway considering there are still no walls available but I’m sure it’ll al work itself out in the end once I get down to the nitty-gritty and take care of it all.

I’m hoping it only takes me the full day on Saturday.  If I can put in 9 hours at a job during the week a straight 9 hours of work in my room would certainly get the job done.  This gives me a whole window of opportunity when it comes to sitting down with my laptop on Sunday (in a nicely organized room) and finally doing something with my personal sites.  I need to put acidgloss.net back up because I’m losing advertising money.  I need to get a new template up on this site because I absolutely hate using free ones and for some reason my previous pink/white template just doesn’t want to work anymore.  So instead of using the one I designed over a year ago, I fully intend to start fresh and see what I can come up with that’s simple and colorful.

I’ll just cross my fingers that everything goes the way I’ve planned it this weekend.

Not a cloud in the sky…

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

CloudsToday is one of those days where you can look out the window and know for sure that it’s going to be absolutely fantastic. The estimated high is around 70°F(21°C for Bronnie) and with a fantastically clear sky the amount of sun that my garden is getting is wonderful. I went out there and did some watering today, I also hope to get down to the landscapers yard and pick up some huge bags of top soil so I can finish filling things in.

Karen and I were outside on Saturday pulling a lot of weeds and cleaning everything out. I did put a lot of fresh soil down and did some planting with extra Miracle Grow but there are a few spots that could use a bit more dirt, especially around our new fencing. We picked up mini-picket fencing from ACMoore and we’ve lined the garden with it to separate things from the main grass. I’m figuring the landscapers really won’t do much work now but that’s nothing a weed wacker couldn’t fix and since I’ve taught Sean how to use it without constantly snapping the wire we’re good to go!

Sunday was difficult for Karen and I, the constant bending we put into Saturday really threw us for a loop. Neither one of us could really move, our legs were all cramped up and my back was killing me. I’m coming off of a stint where I threw my back out a few weeks ago but I’ll admit that I’m a stubborn human being and pushing myself is the only thing I’ve ever known. We took it easy on Sunday and by Monday I was feeling a little better, I’m not too sure about Karen, I didn’t leave the room much yesterday since I was working all day but I assume she’s feeling a bit better as well.

Today’s goals are pretty simple, finish up on a couple of templates, do my laundry, straighten up and vacuum the bedroom, do the dishes, and straighten up around the living room and kitchen and then kick back and relax. In total it should only take me about an hour to accomplish everything cleaning wise, it’s more important to get my work done first though. Guess my “lunch break” will be pretty productive.

On a budget…

Friday, April 11th, 2008

For some reason I was really itching to get out of here last night. Sean and I had spent most of the afternoon in the local libraries in search for information on grant writing. Thankfully when I came home a letter from Dick put me in the right direction. The Rehoboth Library really had nothing that I needed. The Lewes one didn’t either. They told me that the books I was looking for were up in Dover and the rest were on the Deltech Georgetown campus. I really didn’t want to travel that far so I wound up heading over to Atlantic Books and picked up a book that’s a complete guide to grants. It not only gives me a simple breakdown of everything I’m going to need to do but it also gave me a few samples so I can understand what I’m going to need to have listed, and how to go about grouping it together properly. The problem for me isn’t FINDING the grant resources, I’ve found a program that gives me thousands of listings for places to apply to, the issue was the actual write-up. While the Internet is typically a great resource for things, every “How to write a grant” website that I came across told me that I needed to purchase their eBook or the sites linked me to other sites that just kept sending me in circles. Either way I have the book I need and a few emails from Dick explaining how to go about every aspect of it so I’m sure over the course of the next couple of weeks I’ll have my formal write-up and then have the ability to start submitting to different companies.

On our way home we stopped at the market and picked up some things for dinner. I was really insistant that we BBQ last night considering it was the first nice 70°F day that we’d had in a while. So burgers and dogs were really the only menu items last night but that’s OK because there’s plenty left over to do it again tonight if we really wanted to.

After dinner I had the urge to get out of the house and something was pulling me in the direction of Dollar Tree. I knew that we needed a few house-hold items but I was shocked to find out that everything I needed was on sale. Yes, the dollar store was having a sale. The thing I like about Dollar Tree is the fact that it’s a TRUE dollar store. No matter what you pick up it’s only going to be a buck. And thanks to no sales-tax in Delaware, if you get 13 items you pay $13 dollars.

I went in for the basics, carpet fresh, toilet cleaner, air freshner, tissues, and a few odds and ends to complete my need to redecorate the bedroom. I was shocked to find out that almost everything I wanted was 2 for $1. So the simple break down went like this:

2 carpet fresh – $1
2 tissues – $1
2 air freshners – $1
2 bowl cleaners – $1
2 mirrors – $2
1 lotion – $1
Total: $8

How awesome is that?

I then took a trip over to Walmart, unfortunately the dollar store was out of a few items that I needed. There were also some decent sales going on so I picked up the items I couldn’t get at the dollar store, all of which were on sale for a whopping $1! I also loaded up on a few odds and ends for Sean to get by, that gave me another $10 worth of items.

I came home with about 10 bags filled to the rim and only spent $18! If that’s not shopping on a budget, I don’t know what is.