A house of order

I am not a good house keeper. It's a fact. I'm just not good at keeping up on housework. I am however, a really really good procrastinator. I love to read...and crochet...and knit...and facebook...get my point? I also live with 3 very, um untidy, boys.

Well, now I have this new house. A new house that Shane and I built. Actually built, with our hands and sweat and blood. This house took (and is still taking) a lot of work to build. And I would love for it to stay as nice as it was the day we moved in.

Since we moved in, I have been a lot better at keeping up with all the everyday stuff. That's not to say things don't get messy around here. But it usually gets cleaned up in a reasonable amount of time. What is bugging me right now are the storage spaces. All the drawers, cupboards and cabinets that get filled up with random stuff. I feel cluttered and disorganized and I am no where near using my space to the best of it's ability.

So this is the beginning of the end of clutter in my home. (stop laughing, I know I'll have to do this again in the future) My goal is to clean out all our nooks and crannies before 2011 starts.

I started with the Media Room. We don't spend much time in there, so it was pretty easy to tidy up and vacuum all the dust that, for some reason, clings to electronics. My brother once told me, the most important rooms to keep clean are your bedroom and bathroom, because you relax in those rooms. I think he's right so I moved on to my bathroom next.

I NOW HAVE TWO COMPLETELY CLEAN AND CLUTTER FREE ROOMS! YAH ME!

I got my bedroom all clean, but the master closet is scaring me so I decided to skip that and move on to the kitchen. Before I deep clean the kitchen I had to make apple juice.



Now I can put all the canning supplies away for the season and get to work!

Wish me luck!
I'm gonna need it!

Billy Joel - You're My Home - 1976

ONE MORE BRICK IN THE WALL

Building our 1st retaining wall was fun, and dare I say easy. Sure it was hard work, and the blocks where pretty heavy. But it only took us about 3 hours to build the whole wall. And we spent the whole time joking around and feeling proud of ourselves for this great accomplishment. I’ve decided to call that wall

“The Great Wall of Deceit”

I've dubbed the 2nd retaining wall

“The GREAT wall of SHANE”

It has gone up only because of Shane’s force of will. 1st of all the wall required A LOT more blocks. Like 6 truck loads. These blocks had to be loaded into the truck and trailer and later had to be unloaded. These blocks are VERY heavy, so heavy that the boys and I can not lift them. Now we did have a lot of help, from the guy who we bought the blocks from and some neighbors. But for the most part all block transferring was done by Shane.

Then there was the digging. We hired a guy with a tractor to do the lion’s share of this work. But we (by we I mean Shane and sometimes Perrin and more sporadically me) still spent hours digging down the last few inches and making the ground smooth and level.

Then we (again Shane) placed the rocks. Perrin was able to help more with this step and our neighbors helped A LOT! It took one full day and several nights after Shane got off work to place all the blocks.

We (Shane) did it! The wall is up! It won’t be complete until we can pour the cement pad in the spring, but the hard part is over!