This House. Is Clean.

(September 21, 2008)

This weekend was part relaxing (napping between coffee breaks!) and part industrious cleaning and organization.

Week two into Project Apartment Therapy and the place is looking amazing. The proof is in how stoked Joe is about all the cleanliness, and the new sofa. He's all gung ho about it now. Aside from helping by assembling some of the new shelves, Joe has taken out more trash in the last week than...well let's just say it's no wonder I was feeling cluttered. Holy crap-on-a-cracker. Stacks of old Phoenix newspapers, piles of junk mail, broken shoes I've been meaning to mend for five years, clothes that I wouldn't be caught dead wearing, rock show posters that have been taped up and torn down so many times they're frayed at the corners. And Joe's junk is all like phone bills from 1999, expired membership cards, sweaters and jackets with the tags still on them that he never wore and never will...also a thousand copies of his first CD that took up the entire top shelf of the biggest closet.

"Why did you buy a thousand?"

"I had high hopes. At the time I was sure I'd run out!"

I've even been cleaning out every cabinet and drawer. Under the sink I got rid of a disgusting mop bucket, hardened paint rollers, a peeling, dirty old planter, a mysterious rusty exhaust fan that belongs to some other apartment, apparently. Every utensil drawer, every "junk drawer" is purged of debris, scrubbed out and neatened. The little room we use as a storage room? The one that used to be my studio before I got my laptop last November? There's actually walking and sitting space in it now. So it's become a room you actually want to walk into; you can sit and read on a window seat. Unbelievable.

I guess I'm thinking of this re-org as a preamble to house-buying. Though that eventuality is a couple of years off, it's helping to mentally prepare by purging all of the junk. First off, we're happy to live here for a few more years now that it's freshened up and emptied of detritus. Secondly, when it comes time to pack, anything that goes into a box is an item that we need and use.

Besides, how many people can honestly say "I know precisely where EVERYTHING is."