Weekly Mileage

Sunshine caught a firefly!

This week has been a very productive one.

It all started with unearthing the treadmill.

The guest room in the basement has been the dumping ground for stuff I planned to get rid of as I worked on decluttering the house this past spring. More stuff got added to the piles when I had to pull all our camping and emergency preparedness gear out of the closet under the stairs back in May. We had a bad infestation of weevils in a bag of rice that I never got around to properly storing. Ick.

weevils- so gross- and this wasn't even the worst of them

Anyway, when we got home from our road trip I really needed to spend time on the treadmill again, but it had stuff piled all over it. I put everything back in the closet under the stairs (I'd left everything out so I could do a final check to make sure we'd interrupted the life cycle of the weevils and they were really gone), and then kept going. After sorting random items into “ebay”, “paperback swap”, and “yard sale” piles, I turned my attention to the boxes and bins of papers. 

Some of the papers were old bills I could discard, but there was also piles of items to sort for scrapbooking: pictures, cards, old pamphlets and papers from trips, etc. When it was all said and done, I’d consolidated paperwork to keep, papers and pics to scrapbook, and papers to get rid of. Four boxes of papers to get rid of. We had four boxes of papers already in the shed, so I think we have enough to call a document disposal company to come and get it all and shred it for us (I'd planned on burning the papers in the fire pit, but burning paper is messy and takes a long time, so shredding is the better option for us).

this is what it looked like back at the end of April- it was much, much more crowded by the time I tackled it. most of what's in the pic was all the papers that had to be sorted. so much paper!

I also filled a large box with trash, an even larger trash bag with garbage, and a huge cardboard box with other cardboard boxes.

Once the guest room and bathroom were clear, I moved on to the rest of the basement for more decluttering, sorting, and discarding.

By that time, the basement was finally feeling almost clean and tidy. Until the boys dumped out the bins of trucks and train tracks and LEGOs again J

All the sorting and decluttering took me four days, in which I didn’t get on the treadmill, though I did lots of walking that I didn’t track. Friday I walked a bit more than four miles on the treadmill while listing books on ebay and paperbackswap.com. Great use of time! Saturday I did more of the same, and now I only have a few items left to list.

I also finally finished upholstering a chair that I bought about three years ago. It sat in its ugliness for a good while before I got started on it last winter. I was making good progress and just had the back to put on and the last of the trim to attach, when Ocean fell and cut his cheek on the metal teeth used to attach the back. It threw me off my stride and I had no desire to finish it, so I threw a blanket over the back and pushed it against a wall to prevent a repeat. The scar on Ocean’s face has faded significantly, though I still feel terrible that it happened. Pics to come- I need to dig out the before pics from my external hard drive.

In the interest of getting rid of things we don’t need, I decided to finally finish the chair so I could sell it at the yard sale. I’d thought it was going to take awhile to finish, which was another reason I put it off, but in the end I was able to finish it in just a couple hours.

Saturday I also finally got around to painting one of the kid’s beds, but I’ll do a separate post about that.

Weekly mileage

Friday: 4.2 treadmill walk

Saturday: 3.2 treadmill walk

            Total mileage: 7.4 miles

360.85 miles towards #365milechallenge (so close to hitting the mark!)