This was our last free weekend at the house before *hopefully* bringing the boat back up to Annapolis. And man, Did we get after it!
True to our style, we promptly put a TO DO list together on Friday night of everything we wanted to get done before we were ready to walk out of our house for good and turn it over to the renter.
Can I just say how much I love making lists? They make me so happy. I love to write everything down and feel the pure satisfaction of crossing off items I’ve done. It’s a tangible feeling of accomplishment.
So what did we do? Let’s let the pictures speak for themselves.
The basement went from this:


To THIS:


We had REALLY been dreading cleaning that basement. It has essentially been ‘purgatory’ for everything we didn’t know what to do with for the past three years. Not quite ready to throw it out, but we had no place for it upstairs? Put it in the basement!
In the end all it took was a few hours, several contractor trash bags and the ability to finally just get rid of things. It’s amazing how much better we felt after leaving the dump on Saturday morning.
Another area that we have been dreading was the office closet which was a surprisingly large space that has also been a dumping ground for things we didn’t know what else to do with. I don’t have any “before” pictures, but this is what I hauled out, (and this is after our big yard sale a few weeks ago!):

Some of the contents that we had been squirreling away: Four (!) graphing calculators, a bulk pack of five hundred envelopes (Matt bought them about 8 years ago and we used maybe 50 since then), 24 highlighters (in case we needed to do some serious studying soon), enough cords for cameras, ipods, cell phones etc, to make a jump rope out of, and (my favorite) a stack of old cards that we’ve given each other for various events over the past few years. I took a time out to read thru them all …before tossing them. (It’s OK, we aren’t card people.) I’m so lucky to have Matt as my husband. He’s so sweet and thoughtful. I love him so much.
BTW, we kept 2 of the 4 of those graphing calculators. Matt thought we might need them to calculate our positioning if we ever lost our navigational system on the boat. If there’s trigonometry involved then we’re screwed. The extent of my math is calculating a 20% tip.
And the final result? Boom. Look at all those things crossed off. Tangible accomplishment!