One of my goals for the year has been to organize and sort out more of the stuff we have in our house. We have big closets but they've been crammed full of things we're no longer using. Unfortunately for us, both my husband and I are bad about keeping things that we no longer need. For my husband, the problem is a (possibly genetic) packrat mentality. His family doesn't seem to ever get rid of anything (as evidenced by some of the items unearthed from his parents' basement upon their move a few years ago).
For me, the problem is about the sheer amount of time required to get rid of things. Sounds crazy, right? How hard can it be to just throw something away? If it were a problem of putting trash in a trash can this would be no problem. We don't have a sanitation or a rubbish problem. But the stuff we have accumulated is supposed to be useful to someone (reference husband and packrat family), and it is wasteful to throw away useful items and heaven forbid something might go to a landfill instead of being re-used or re-cycled or that needs to be safely disposed of. And lets not talk about garage sales, re-sale shops, charity clothing drives, craigslist, and ebay. There are just too many options for how to get rid of something.
I've done garage sales and they take way too much time for too little reward. Why spend 3 days preparing and 5 hours sitting to make $50? Besides, it's not about the money for me. If I want extra money, I'd do better picking up a few extra hours at work. There are a few Goodwill spots around town, but we're about 20 minutes away from all of them and none of them are enroute to anywhere we ever go. There are charities who will pick items up at your house, but I don't have time to sit around and wait for them and am not a fan of asking strangers to show up at my house when I'm not home.
Yep, sounds like a crazy problem. But crazy as I am, I still have closets to clean and junk to get rid of. My most recent project involved my almost-4-year-old's closet. It's a nice-sized walk-in closet where we've installed extra shelving, but the shelves have been stuffed full of boxes of out-grown clothes for the better part of two years. Somewhere in the 12-18 month size, we ran out of friends and relatives with little boys who were still littler than our son. As Trystan finally outgrew things, we had no easy way to give them away. So they accumulated. And accumulated.
Friday was a day off school for Charlotte (but Trystan went preschool), so I seized the opportunity to haul the boxes out to my car. I filled my trunk. And the backseat. And the front passenger seat. And the floor under Charlotte's booster. We took it all to Once Upon a Child, a local resale shop. They spent about 45 minutes digging through my things and picked a few things they wanted. 35 items, $35. Well, $25 after Charlotte chose a few things off the racks for herself. Except 35 items barely made a dent in the stash.
Back at home, I moved all of the clothes out of the plastic storage boxes and into trash bags and loaded them into my husband's SUV so that I could safely transport children again. Then we lucked out. He was prepared to drive it all to a goodwill drop off site when I saw a sign at my daughter's school for a clothing drive. We unloaded them Tuesday morning.
I am happy to know that Trystan's outgrown clothes will good to a good cause. And I am even happier that my son can now choose his own clothes in the morning because I have room to hang them all low enough for him to reach (previously, the low rack was mostly crowded with boxes so his clothes were high up in the closet). We might even be able to store a few of his toys in his closet now and can make our basement family room a little less of a chaotic kid-mess. Well, maybe after we get the crib and changing table out of his room.
Anyone need a crib?
Friday, March 04, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Mrs Fix-It: Window Screens
Over eleven years, our house has seen a few hail storms. I've been ignoring a few holes in our window screens for the past two or three years, but lately we're looking at our house with new eyes, and having holes in some of our screens large enough to let large wasps in the house is not particularly attractive.
I am a bit of an HGTV addict (though over the past 2-3 years I've watched little or no TV that didn't involve dancing singing vegetables and animals). But I've watched enough home improvement shows to know that fixing window screens is not that hard. So today, we're tackling two of the worst offenders. You know what? It isn't that hard.
We started with the kitchen window, a monstrous 4'x4' window over the sink. My husband had to hand the window out to me on the deck. The old screen is held in to a channel by a thin rubber strip, so removing the screen is a matter of digging one end out and pulling. Once that is done, you cut a new piece of screen fabric a little larger than the frame, and go about cramming a new piece of rubber divider into the channel to hold it in place. Then put the screen back in the window. Et voila.
There is a 2-ended tool that we picked up at Lowes specifically for screens that cost about $7. One end is like a hooked utility knife, and the other is a roller that will push the rubber channel into the groove. The channel itself comes in different sizes. You take apart your window then go shopping with a scrap of the original. I didn't realize about the size thing until we were standing in the store aisle, so I bought a kit that had 3 sizes of channel and compared it to the real window once we got home. We already had the screening material sitting in the basement from an abandoned craft project. My new screens are a bit of an upgrade, as the old screens were a nylon-y fabric mesh and the new screening is actually metal. Maybe the new metal screen will better withstand the next hail storm.Sunday, February 20, 2011
Shall We Stay or Shall We Go?
When my husband and I bought our house 11 years ago, it was my dream house. It is much bigger than the house I grew up in, with a bigger kitchen and more than twice as many bathrooms and just so much space. And oh the closets. Our house has lovely closets.
But time changes and expectations change and occupants change. When we moved in as a newly engaged couple, four bedrooms meant we had a master suite for the two of us, a guest room for visiting family, and we each had our own office. So what if my kitchen cabinets were filled not long after we moved in, there was still room at the top of the little pantry cupboard for extra serving platters. And once we bought dining room furniture, our good china could move out of storage and into display.
11 years is a long time, I think. And since then we have added two children and two cats and more dishes and bicycles and a lawn mower and have I mentioned toys? Our two-car garage is really just a two-car garage. Not a two-car plus two bicycle plus lawn mower plus trashcans and power tools garage. Our guest room is now my son's room, and my office is my daughter's bedroom. The dishes that don't fit in the kitchen are stored partially in the basement and partially in our closet. The one unfinished storage room in the basement is bursting at the seams. And I keep running over the wheel of the lawn mower (since it's either that or I hit my husband's car trying to squeeze mine into the garage.
We are at a crossroads. Do we stay where we are at, or do we move to a bigger house?
We have no room to expand. The basement is finished and the lot is too small to add on. I might be able to squeeze a few more square feet of cabinet space into the kitchen, but it will likely never hold the double-oven that I really want for the big family dinners I like to cook. And our house was one of the bigger floorplans in the neighborhood. We are already at the top end of what a buyer in the area might be willing to spend. If we remodel, we will simply be spending our money and not investing it.
But we have friends in the neighborhood, and a subdivision pool, and a quiet little park in walking distance. We are not in a high-traffic area and we are convenient to major highways. We have generous sized rooms and generous-sized closets and we have already painted and re-arranged it all to our liking. (Ok, so we've painted and re-arranged most of it to our liking, sometimes more than once). And planted trees. And built a beautiful deck. And upgraded the kitchen/greatroom floor and replaced a sliding door with a french one. We have taken care of our house like people expecting to live here forever.
The things we don't have in our house and can't get in our house are easily attainable...in another part of the metro area. We would have to sell our house and move. Probably move up in cost, a bit, too.
So, we have a decision to make. Our daughter goes to private school, so a move will not uproot her from her friends. It would, in all likelihood, move us closer to them. We would have longer commutes to work. We might position ourselves in the middle of the housing price spectrum instead of at the far end. We might not be able to sell our house.
Thinking about moving is scary. Thinking about staying and doing enough minor remodelling to make do is exhausting. Adding up the cost of a move or a remodel is not as horrifying as I feared. Either way, I'm hoping that over the next year or so, our housing situation will improve in some form or another. Whether we're just doing massive closet clean-outs or trying to re-purpose the laundry room as a mudroom/pantry, or whether we're spending hours in the car with a realtor, or in various showrooms with a builder or general contractor. It will be an improvement. Won't it?
But time changes and expectations change and occupants change. When we moved in as a newly engaged couple, four bedrooms meant we had a master suite for the two of us, a guest room for visiting family, and we each had our own office. So what if my kitchen cabinets were filled not long after we moved in, there was still room at the top of the little pantry cupboard for extra serving platters. And once we bought dining room furniture, our good china could move out of storage and into display.
11 years is a long time, I think. And since then we have added two children and two cats and more dishes and bicycles and a lawn mower and have I mentioned toys? Our two-car garage is really just a two-car garage. Not a two-car plus two bicycle plus lawn mower plus trashcans and power tools garage. Our guest room is now my son's room, and my office is my daughter's bedroom. The dishes that don't fit in the kitchen are stored partially in the basement and partially in our closet. The one unfinished storage room in the basement is bursting at the seams. And I keep running over the wheel of the lawn mower (since it's either that or I hit my husband's car trying to squeeze mine into the garage.
We are at a crossroads. Do we stay where we are at, or do we move to a bigger house?
We have no room to expand. The basement is finished and the lot is too small to add on. I might be able to squeeze a few more square feet of cabinet space into the kitchen, but it will likely never hold the double-oven that I really want for the big family dinners I like to cook. And our house was one of the bigger floorplans in the neighborhood. We are already at the top end of what a buyer in the area might be willing to spend. If we remodel, we will simply be spending our money and not investing it.
But we have friends in the neighborhood, and a subdivision pool, and a quiet little park in walking distance. We are not in a high-traffic area and we are convenient to major highways. We have generous sized rooms and generous-sized closets and we have already painted and re-arranged it all to our liking. (Ok, so we've painted and re-arranged most of it to our liking, sometimes more than once). And planted trees. And built a beautiful deck. And upgraded the kitchen/greatroom floor and replaced a sliding door with a french one. We have taken care of our house like people expecting to live here forever.
The things we don't have in our house and can't get in our house are easily attainable...in another part of the metro area. We would have to sell our house and move. Probably move up in cost, a bit, too.
So, we have a decision to make. Our daughter goes to private school, so a move will not uproot her from her friends. It would, in all likelihood, move us closer to them. We would have longer commutes to work. We might position ourselves in the middle of the housing price spectrum instead of at the far end. We might not be able to sell our house.
Thinking about moving is scary. Thinking about staying and doing enough minor remodelling to make do is exhausting. Adding up the cost of a move or a remodel is not as horrifying as I feared. Either way, I'm hoping that over the next year or so, our housing situation will improve in some form or another. Whether we're just doing massive closet clean-outs or trying to re-purpose the laundry room as a mudroom/pantry, or whether we're spending hours in the car with a realtor, or in various showrooms with a builder or general contractor. It will be an improvement. Won't it?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)