The Great Clean and Purge Project – Week Three Recap

You know, as I’m looking at that title, I’m wondering what kind of people need three weeks to clean and purge their home?

Apparently, we do. Oh, right…and we’re not finished yet.

In our defense, we had kind of a light week in the Clean and Purge department. We did not plow through the process with quite as much gusto as we did during the packing and unpacking phases. We took some time off for birthday celebrating, appointments and errands, doing our CSA pickup at the farm and picking our own beans, snap peas, and herbs, celebrating the Fourth of July holiday and watching fireworks, and taking Zilla for her very first school uniform fitting. (My heart!)

The major points of interest (if anyone’s actually interested) included:

• Hanging of artwork on the main living floor in the office, living room, and dining room.
• Finally finishing the cookbook project. I removed a few books that we don’t use anymore and I have a huge box of cooking magazines that are outta here as soon as the Hub hauls the box downstairs. Cat One is going to be very disappointed as he has spent the better part of the last four days sleeping in that box. Get over it, Cat.

• Removal of the piles of books, CDs, tapes (yes, we still had a few cassette tapes hoarded away somewhere…no player, mind you, but tapes) that we were not keeping. What wasn’t claimed by a friend or relative will land on the pile for The Great Yard Sale that we’re hoping to have very soon.
• Intense cleaning of – get this – the central air vents on the main floor. If my Mom didn’t already know we had this job done, I’d tell her to sit down for the news. The inside of those little slats is nine kinds of nasty when it’s been forever since they were last cleaned. And the only thing that really worked on the dirt? My awesome new homemade all-purpose cleaning solution. Wow.
• Part one of a major scrub-down of the kitchen stove top. Yes, our stove top is cleaned daily. No, we do not get to the stubborn burnt-on stuff often enough. This week, though, that stove is going to look like brand new. The Hub took a first pass at it; I’m coming in for part two this week.
• Cleaned off the top of our kitchen storage hutch and cleaned out the inside of our kitchen storage hutch. The inside of this hutch is where we keep all the odds and ends – placemats and napkins, holiday dishes, candlesticks, water pitcher, serving pieces that don’t fit in the regular cupboards (because while we do have extended height on our cabinets, we do not have anything like extended depth). The top is home to part of my teapot collection and various other things we’ve collected over the years.  We made some fast and firm decisions about what we do and do not use and out went another big pile of stuff from our midst.

Funny story about that kitchen hutch…it’s actually the armoire from our bedroom set. Yup, living in the kitchen. When we were newly married, we rented an amazing apartment that had an enormous master bedroom/bathroom suite. I think that bedroom had to be something like 12′ x 20′ at least. (I know, right?) The bedroom held our bed, two night tables, a long dresser, a tall dresser, and this Beast of an armoire designed for a TV, etc., as well as one or two extra little pieces for aesthetic purposes.

When we moved into our current home, not only was the new bedroom smaller than the apartment bedroom and thus too small for all the furniture, the movers couldn’t even get The Beast up our stupidly narrow and twice-turning stairway.

It was at that moment that I decided I hated this house. But I digress. Anyway, since it wasn’t going up the stairs or fitting in the bedroom even if it did, we moved it into the kitchen. It lives in the spot that is designated on our floor plan as a breakfast nook. This nook is completely ridiculous, however, because our dining room is literally two steps past that nook and isn’t even separated from sight by a full wall. A breakfast table there would just be superfluous.

Since we really couldn’t see the sense in putting a table less than five feet from the dining room table, we plopped the armoire there instead and there it will stay. (Please note: This layout is hardly to scale or in any sort of correct proportions but it’s reasonable enough to make the point here.)

And would you believe that while we cleaned out that hutch/armoire thing we discussed for the ten thousandth time the tragedy of the thing being separated from the rest of the bedroom set and the ultimate benefit of said separation because, after all, our kitchen cabinets are too narrow for the wide serving dishes that live in the hutch/armoire thing. This is how we roll here.

And so that brings us to the end of our week three recap with a bonus life lesson: When life throws you a house that isn’t the right size for your furniture, don’t be bitter. Put that sucker in the kitchen and throw some dishes in there like you did it on purpose.