I had a most wonderful weekend. It was a weekend of puttering. My goal was to deal with the excess of our upstairs, which had accumulated downstairs. A dose of income taxes. With a very nice sprinkling of family.
Saturday was my fun day. I talked with &/or emailed each one of my siblings. We have chosen a date to get together. Fun times ahead! I squeezed in some taxes and then my boys came for supper. The meal turned out well and afterwards, we watched an array of videos featuring each one of my sons. Ahhh. It was a good day!
Sunday was my reality day. I needed to do hard things. I had to start tackling the basement.
One small step at a time, this:
Became this:
I have overnight guests planning to come stay with us. I have been cooking meals. I have been cleaning and tidying our home on a daily basis. I stepped away from writing this to replenish my coffee and dusted the bathroom fluff, the mouldings on the kitchen cupboards and ran my new "duster" over the baseboards in the hallway.
I long for another day to simply putter away at things. I'm a putterer. It is the way I used to get big jobs done back in my more ambitious days. I simply pulled out a drawer here and there and dealt with the contents. One drawer at a time. One cupboard at a time.
I'm starting to do this again.
I have found a part of myself which has been lost for a very long time, somewhere in the rubble of this renovation. I had become the person I ranted about yesterday. I had become a person who overlooked the dirt, dust and excessive hair because everything underneath it was in dire need of maintenance.
Our renewed home is not fancy or overdone in any way, shape or form. As my oldest son put it when he walked in and saw all that had been done, "It was long overdue ..."
Having refurbished everything from floor to ceiling, it has raised my standards. "Good enough" no longer cuts it. I want to keep on top of things so I don't get so far down under the dirt, dust and cat hair that I stop caring again.
I wrote my rant about cat hair yesterday, visualising vacuuming the clean mop at regular intervals as I kept atop the cat hair upstairs. Then I started dealing with the basement. The process of emptying the upstairs began six weeks ago. Six weeks of cat hair balled up and amassed in, around and under all that had accumulated downstairs. Yesterday, I saw floor I hadn't seen in a very long time. I took the dry mop and captured all the cat hair which had come to rest while I wasn't looking.
When I looked at the mop after my light dusting, the mop was full of black cat hair. It was black. It never looks like that when I mop upstairs. Because the upstairs is ... clean!
Wafting cat hair or not, the upstairs has become a place which is actually clean. Thus, the stray cat hairs are a bother to me.
This renovation has done so much for me. It has shaken me up and awoken a part of me I thought was lost forever. The desire to clean, sort, organize and cull has sparked the part of me who likes inviting people into our home. Not only for a cup of coffee, but a meal with overnight accommodations available as needed.
I remember how delighted I was to find items which had been lost to me as we moved the upstairs, downstairs. Little did I know at the time, I would find myself and my old standards in amongst the excess as well.
Some things have been kept. Others have been discarded, recycled or given away. I think I'll keep my standards. I've missed this part of myself.
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