Eureka!
I don’t know, sometimes you have to just about bang your head against the wall to get your brain to make any sense.
I have convinced The Commander that May would be a good time to visit us on The Planet Ann Arbor. I *think* it’s something she wants to do. *I* think it’ll be fun and I bet once we get on the road, she will too. She proclaimed, “Well! I wouldn’t want to stay much longer than a week!” Octo-women are awfully busy and she has a bunch of home improvement stuff going on and I know she wants to get back to that. And that’s okay, a week is about my limit too. 😈
As small as our house is, there’s plenty of space for a guest and there are also plenty of beds. But the place is pretty disheveled after 22 years and I had some work to do. When The Commander and Grandroobly used to come and visit, they would sleep on the hide-a-bed in the “back room,” aka family room type A-dition. Grandroobly used a little flashlight to keep him from tripping over the trash or falling down the stairs as he wended his way through the house to the bathroom in the middle of the night. This time I thought it might be handy to put The Commander up in her own private space. So I decided it was time to clean up Lizard Breath’s room.
Lizard’s room is not really all that messy. There are rooms in The Landfill that are a whole heckuva lot worse, with Your Favorite Blahgger being the main culprit. But it has been a while since Lizard’s been home for more than a couple days. She spent half of last summer living and working in Kalamazoo and ended up with something like three days here before leaving for California. Not enough time to sort everything out, especially with about a gazillion friends to spend time saying farewell to. And with two passengers and camping gear, not everything would fit in her car. I mailed quite a few of the important things out to her but there’s still a lot of stuff left behind. I doubt she even wants all of it.
After avoiding the room for many moons, I started out slowly, picking through it a few minutes at a time. Yesterday, I got to looking at the bed and began actually *making* it in at least a relatively proper fashion. Liz’s room is in the middle of the back of the house and it has two doors. The “back” door is a slider (a *persnickety* slider) that opens onto the landing at the top of the basement stairs. The room is only a little bit wider than the length of her bed and sometime during her teenage years, she placed the bed so that it blocked the back door. I assume this was for purposes of privacy, to keep people like Kayak Woman from traipsing through her room.
So, yesterday, I was struggling with making the bed and, in order to deal with the foot end, I kept having to either walk all the way through the house around to the back door of her room or clamber over the footboard. Until… EUREKA!! I was hit by the lightning bolt that this room belonged to someone with a California driver’s license! There was no reason I had to leave the bed that way any more. I could put it wherever I wanted. And we could actually *walk* through the room if we wanted to. Like we used to do before it was someone’s bedroom.
Make no mistake. I’m not getting rid of anything (except empty envelopes and old plastic bags and stuff like that). I couldn’t throw out my little lizard’s stuff if I tried! And there’s no reason to. I’m putting it into drawers or boxing it up until she has time to deal with it. But I can rearrange the room. And we can walk through it again.
I miss the days when the door was blocked and she and her friends would be in there giggling and playing music into the night. It was a really *long* time before I could even begin to get started on cleaning it. But I think I’m going to enjoy having another route through the house again, after all these years. Love you, Lizard, hope this is okay…
Here are before and after pics and a *very* hastily arranged diagram of our loverly home, aka The Landfill:
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:34 pm
my room has such character!!
WARNING: whatever you do, WHATEVER, do NOT get rid of those enormous paintings (the copies of the Warhol and the Lichtenstein). Put them somewhere safe if you must (not the shed, as was done in the past) but don’t dispose of them. I spent DAYS on those… If you find that silver box that matches the hanging mirror with the shelf, would you send it to me? I think there is something in there I want. It’s unimportant but would be cool.
still my room =P
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:43 pm
The trenormous paintings are currently behind your desk. Pretty safe. I’ll send the silver box if I find it. I haven’t yet. Yes, your room does have character. I *think* when you went into middle school and we were ready to make that room into another bedroom, we gave you a choice of rooms and you chose that room, the smaller room. I think it all worked out.
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:47 pm
And what if Fran wants some “privacy, to keep people like Kayak Woman from traipsing through her room.”? Can she move the bed back, invite her friends over, and play loud music into the wee hours?
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Bwa-ha! Yes, she can shut the persnickety sliding door and do whatever she wants! 🙂
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:48 pm
If Valdemort succeeds in getting a job in GaWBA-Land, I’ll have to do the same thing with her room …
But, if I really need something to do, there’s still the basement, the kitchen cupboards, and my office (not necessarily in that order, either).
May 4th, 2007 at 8:08 am
I can sleep anywhere and can also find my way to the bathroom regardless. Actually, I am doing exactly the same thing with half of my hbouse i n preparation for the painters and the carpet outfit, Painting takes place from Monday for several days next week and the carpet will probably be here at the end of the month.
I really like the way the house looks when so many things are taken out – things in some cases that were convevienses to help Jack manage himself and his belongings. One problem is where to put things for a temporary time and still live here!!
F……………
May 4th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Move the Traf out of the garage and use that space (now that you don’t have to worry about digging out and de-icing!!) 😀
May 4th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
I remember when I announced that I had found an apt. after college and would be moving out of the Parental Units’ house (again). Within minutes Bubs was in there measuring as she prepared to change it from “Janes’ room” to a guest room. mere minutes!
May 4th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Well Jane, at least you had a room in the house. When I left they completely moved!
Rey has been off to Montana for two years and his room is still his. But Carl uses it for storage of 1) kids toys (the ones he takes care of) 2) His project du jour and 3) Anything that must be moved to keep away from tiny hands that are getting taller and learning how to climb up onto chairs. So whenever Rey comes back his room must be hastily “cleaned”. But underneath it all it still has as much Rey clutter as anything else.
Longterm project – to really clean it out (as well as the basement). Our “guest” room has the old twin “guest beds” and the crib, other toys, etc….
Longerterm project – to move Ashlan’s room to the guest room, Our room to Ashlan’s room, and our room becomes Carl’s project room. One can only dream.
May 4th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
In my not-so humble experience/opinion, I think that freshman year is a good time to try to keep things the same, if at all possible. Life does throw some curve balls sometimes though.
When Liz first went away to school, the first thing the GG did was clean and rearrange her room so *he* could sit in there and read. *Not* a good idea. The first time she came home for a weekend, he was at Houghton Lake and she called him and gave him an *earful*.
Two years later, when she went to Spain and I started taking classes, she offered the room to me for a study room. Studying in the kitchen was not cool in her opinion. I found that I like to study by the front window where there’s just enough pedestrian traffic to keep me from going stir-crazy. But I did a good job of junking up her room with stuff anyway with the result that I spent my spring break that year cleaning it all up before she got home from Spain.
At this point, I have no active need for the room on a permanent basis so I’m happy enough storing the stuff that didn’t get to California until she has the time and psychic energy to deal with it. I have enough other messes in my house to keep me plenty busy. And I am 99% done fixing up her room and it looks *great*! 🙂
May 5th, 2007 at 7:07 am
Dave’s room/shambling mound/vortex of chaos:
We started mucking it out last summer before he left for college. We made some progress, but not a whole lot, not having access to whichever river that Hercules diverted to clean out the mythical stables. Dan rearranged the room a little bit, to make enough floor space to place a bedspread on the floor, defining a “guest space” for his friends. But basically, welcome back, Dave.
Maybe there will be more motivation this summer!