Waving goodbye to more stuff

Saturday afternoon an old friend of Shelby’s came over to the house and helped me move the big metal desk out.  We managed the task without straining our backs or denting the walls — thanks for your prayers!  In addition, this friend took a truckload of stuff from the substantial “give away” pile, making it much smaller.  On Sunday I processed the pile of oversized trash in the garage.  (The smaller stuff had been going out in my trash can as we went along.)  By “processed,” I mean that I took things apart, sawed things apart, ripped things apart, whatever it took to make them small enough to fit in a trash can.  I watched the garbage truck haul it all away this morning as I left for work.  It’s a good feeling!

Clearing the shed

I continue to make progress with the house.  Last night I cleared out the toolshed in the back yard.  We had removed the large items earlier, so it wasn’t too bad:  mostly empty boxes and plastic bottles set aside to re-use.  I will take them to be recycled at some point.  A shed is a dark and usually undisturbed space, so I wasn’t surprised to encounter some really big spiders in the process.  Not my favorite part of the job!

The list of things left to do is getting shorter.  Maybe I really can get it done in the next two weeks.

A new home for the desk

Well, here are my two steps forward:  The garage door opener is now fixed, and we found a new home for Shelby’s huge metal desk.  We had been told that you can’t even give these desks away, and there’s some truth in that.  We called around, and the usual places that take furniture didn’t want it.  Fortunately, Shelby’s good friend, W., was able to help us out.  He knew somebody that just built a large work building and was in the process of furnishing it.  Sure enough, he’s interested in the desk.

Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get it back out of the house.  It’s big and it’s heavy, and the hallway is narrow — and freshly painted.  Say a prayer for us.

The tale of the garage door opener

Working on this house has been two steps forward and one step back.  Honestly, I’ve been telling people for three months that I’m two weeks from being finished.  There are three reasons for this:

1.  Some things just take longer to do than I think they will.  Sometimes, a whole lot longer.

2.  No matter how carefully I draw up my list of things that still need doing, later I always find I forgot a few things.

3.  While I’m trying to get the original list of things done, other things break.

The latest in category #3 is the garage door opener.  Sometimes we would try to open the garage door, and nothing would happen.  No, the problem wasn’t with the batteries in the remote.  It was that the breaker had been tripped.  Well, we finally got around to calling a garage door opener repair place, and they suggested plugging the opener into an outlet on a different breaker to see if it was the opener or the circuit that was the problem.  So I did that.  And I ran the garage door up and down several times to see if it would trip the breaker, because it doesn’t happen every single time.  Turns out that wasn’t such a good idea.  Smoke started coming out of the opener.  So, now the opener has to be fixed for sure, and I’m still not certain whether there’s a problem with the original circuit.  Another step back.  Time for two more steps forward!

It’s all sorted out now

As some of you probably already know, I have been occupied with preparing my father-in-law Shelby’s house for sale for about a year now.  (He passed away in February of 2007.)  I spent most of the day Saturday sorting the remaining contents of the garage into stuff to keep, stuff to give away, and stuff to throw away.  Shelby was an auto mechanic and had also done some metal work.  Changing oil is about the extent of my automotive expertise, and I prefer to work in wood — so a lot of the stuff in his garage is foreign to me.  That makes it difficult to try to decide what to do with it.  My wife and I have been chipping away at this task for a few months, and we were finally close enough that one big push could finish it.  So now it’s finished.  And I’m so glad!  We still have to actually move the stuff out of the house, and there are a few minor repair items to attend to, but we’re getting really close. 

Something to Say

My apologies to the three or four people who have been faithfully checking my blog for new stuff.  While it’s true that I’ve been busy lately, the main reason I haven’t posted anything for a few weeks is that I’ve had nothing to say.

I have been considering taking this blog in a different direction, writing more personally and less formally – just sharing what’s going on in my life.  It’s not likely to make my posts more exciting, but there might be more of them.  (And this is America, after all, where more is better!)  I’m a fairly private person, and this would be a difficult thing for me to do.  But my dear wife, who is at least as private as I am, has shared on her blog a bit of her experience of grief over her father’s death.  If she can do that, maybe I can open up a little bit too. 

Of course, if I have any thoughts worthy of a more formal approach, I would post those as well.