Enter At Your Own Risk

I don’t know how you all are, but when I know I have a big project that has to get done, I have to prep myself (and others I expect to participate) ahead of time. I mean like a few weeks ahead of time; I’m no better if I try and spring these types of things on myself than I am if I try and spring it on my “helpers”.

We have one of those rooms that I feel all people have, or at least I tell myself that to feel better about mine. It’s that room where everything goes when “unexpected company just dropped by”, or “this needs to go out to the shed, but I’ll put it back here for now”.  But somehow, we never seem to go back and retrieve anything we put back there, we just continue to add to it.

The last time that room was cleaned was about a year ago, so after fifty surprise visitors and sixteen trips to the shed that never happened later, it’s a wreck, not to mention an OSHA health hazard. If I tripped over one thing or another in the floor once, I tripped and almost busted my behind twelve other times.  At any given time you could hear some loud cursing and carrying-on coming from back there when some unfortunate soul had to go look for an object who had met its sad fate to land back there.

Now to even begin to describe the shelving in there that was supposed to contain things in one area: all of our plastic bowls and containers/lids as well as all my cookware, tea pitchers, baking pans, multiple holiday dish sets and all of the decorations per holiday – it was a disaster!

And gracious at the groans that would go up in the air all around me when I would ask someone to find me a bowl and a lid for leftovers after a meal. If you were lucky enough to find the right size bowl after three times trying and me sending you back for something bigger or smaller, your next impossible feat was to then to find the matching lid.

And let me tell you ladies, because I know am not the only one: I don’t just have all pretty and matching Tupperware bowls; I have Cool Whip bowls, Parkay butter bowls, and the best of them all bowls - those school fundraiser cookie bowls! If I buy something in plastic, and it comes with a lid, it gets washed and stored for later use, over and over again. We never know real butter bowls from left-over lima bean bowls in this house, every refrigerator visit is a surprise. 

I parted-way with a lot of things today; I was picky at first, meticulously going through bags and boxes, trying to sort and keep what was necessary. Three and a half solid hours later, I was chunking stuff into those huge lawn garbage bags as fast as my helpers. Now my curb will look as bad as that back room – until trash day.