Finally, a Normal Day!

Whew! 2009 has been our busiest year yet. When my mom's home caught fire in January, the insurance people hired a fire damage cleaning company that will come in the home, pack everything, clean anything smoke damaged, store your items and clean the home before the contractors come in and rebuild. Mom has a lot of stuff, I think I mentioned she is a pack rat, so there were a lot of boxes packed and stored in their warehouse.

Mom's home is almost completed, and they were about to put all of Mom's things back into the home. Ack! No! No, no, no, we want to sell the home and keep it empty! So Husband has been making calls to find storage space and moving vehicles. We explored several options-- buying an old trailer and using it for storage: kind of pricey but it's a permanent solution; buying and building storage sheds/buildings: pricey, plus we just don't have the time to build them and didn't know where we would put the sheds; renting storage space: none of the local storage places have available space and unlike commercial storage places in the city, these local places don't have a whole lot of choices, plus that's a lot of monthly payments to store those things long-term.

Finally, the Husband and I talked and talked and we agreed to put her stuff in our garage and basement. We have a big enough house that we don't really use the basement for much-- mostly it's a catch-all for things and we already decided that we were going to eliminate the play area for the kids. So we cleaned up a corner and moved all the toys and stuff to the other side of the basement. We cleaned out the garage and moved out the truck and van. Then we made the call and they delivered Mom's stuff for a fee (wayyyy cheaper than renting a truck and they also unloaded it, so we saved our backs!). There were 5 truckloads of my Mom's things. Holy cow, what a lot of stuff.

One truck was mostly furniture. Those went directly into the apartment. 3 trucks were filled with boxes, and those all went into the basement and the garage. Totally filled up the place. A fifth truck was maybe half-full, a mixture of boxes and some odds and ends that didn't fit in the furniture truck. It was nice that we didn't have to rent a truck and do it ourselves, which we were prepared to do, but dreading. We would have also needed to drop the kids off at the grandparent's house and that would have added onto the driving time as well. All in all, it worked out. With Mom's stuff here, I can go through her boxes and get a head start on sorting it for her, and selling some of the extras at yard sales or in my etsy shop.

Today, the Husband is off and it's so nice not to have to go anywhere or do anything except just regular stuff-- I'm working on the cherries we picked and he's doing yard work. The kids are playing outside, begging to use the slip and slide. They're pouting because we said no, the ground is still soggy from all the rain we've had, but we have something up our sleeves for tomorrow. If it's hot tomorrow, and it is supposed to be, we are going to the state park where you can swim in a mountain-fed lake! I'll pack a picnic and everything!

And because I don't like posting without pictures, here's a couple of pics taken recently...

Here chicky, chicky, chicky! Come and hop in my frying pan!

Oldest found a four-leaf clover!! What good luck!