progress on the wrong side

[cimorene]

We sold MIL's summer cottage a few weeks ago, for 80k (ish), and the long-term plan is that now we should finish making it possible to live in both sides of the house, move into our side, and figure out how to rent the side that was for MIL since we can't afford the mortgage and utilities on the whole house on our own, nor can we sell it in its current state (and likely not after either, at least not for what we put into it).

Our side of the house has no electricity or water right now. There's a bathroom with fixtures (but no water or electric) and a bathroom with only a small portion of the rough plumbing done that has walls but no ceiling, the electrician stopped halfway through putting the breaker box in, and the kitchen has two walls without surfaces on them that have to be demolished and refinished by carpenters before the cabinets can be put in. Apart from that, there's painting and floors to be put in and trim to be put in and painted, but those are things we do ourselves. So after a few weeks our contractor managed to come review the status and estimated another 20k, and we're waiting for the master plumber sometime next week or later to add his estimate to the pile.

Then we would have to wait for them to have time of course, and contractors are extremely busy and booked in advance in this area which, I suppose, simply can't be helped. Also all of this doesn't include that our gutters currently illegally divert our rainwater into the sewers which we technically need to fix as well, and haven't even started on.

But just talking about this forced us to look at our stalled-out plans which we've barely had cause to glance at for 9 months and we'd gotten so depressed we couldn't remember our planned kitchen layout, and still haven't found the papers with the floorplan specifications either. We got excited to be able to actually move in somewhere and not live camping in a too-small flat without a bedroom surrounded by piles of junk and unable to clean or unpack our own belongings - even though that is still far in the future, of course.

So we've redirected some of this energy this week, the second of Wax's summer vacation weeks, into moving boxes/piles of MIL's belongings that we can't donate to the Red Cross until they reopen to the basement. This doesn't help us move any faster, it just makes our current living circumstances better and more like living here versus camping here in squalor. We cleared so much additional living space up here by dumping this stuff in the basement that:

• there are no chairs upside down on top of other chairs in the entire flat


• no more piles of unsorted junk in the living room or computer room


• The entire top of our kitchen table (now in the livingroom) is no longer covered completely in a stack up to 1 meter high in places composed mostly of boxes of paperwork because MIL obsessively and paranoidly saved paperwork including back taxes and correspondence from both her decades-dead parents and her decades-dead husband going back in some cases to the 1950s, newsletters and student magazines from when she was in college, every receipt for literally everything she bought in the last year, multi-page printouts of the browser window each time she paid an electronic bill online, and entire websites just printed out, stapled, and filed


• This cleared enough floorspace in the livingroom to disassemble the bunnies' cage and remove and beat all the layered rag rugs in the half of the room that the bunnies play in. We rebuilt a taller, better bunny cage and cleared the room so there is now an empty space in the middle of it, rather than stacks of boxes and furniture leaving only a series of narrow pathways through the clutter. I gave myself a 24hr sinus headache and we both worked ourselves to exhaustion over 11 hours doing that on Tuesday.


• Yesterday we even managed to dispose of a pile of junk here in the 'dining' room (which is full of our computers and our clothes right now, so essentially a combination office and walk-in closet) and disassembled an ugly and rickety pressboard cabinet with glass shelves that was here when we bought the house and has been threatening all along to collapse under the not-very-great weight of stuff we put in it. We put up another of our Ivar bookcases instead (Ikea's imitation of the fancier and sturdier Finnish Lundia).

We have a bunch of darker curtains that we've used with partial to complete success to darken the room in summer before, but they were all packed up, with the thinking that we wouldn't need them until after we'd moved in and been able to unpack, so I don't actually know where any of them are. We have some light cotton curtains up now - the ones with hedgehogs on them which I made for our bedroom 10 years ago or so - which are light and pleasant in the daytime or the winter, but it's still not really as dark as one would like at the darkest part of the night and they don't help much with that.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

This is amazing progress and I so wishing you all the best. Thank you so much for the update.

[ephemera]

Congratulations on progress that makes your immediate environment better!

[msilverstar]

Must be hard but a relief to get some of the crap out of the way. Can you recycle all that paper?

Also, it never occurred to me how important dark curtains would be in the middle of the night. I hope you find them soon.

[cimorene]

Not as important when Wax isn't working shifts. We haven't really looked very thoroughly because so much of our stuff is packed in boxes and going through all of that would mean, well, unpacking.

But yeah, we've taken most of the non-personal paper to the recycling collection point already and I've finished putting the sensitive information ones through a paper shredder and wrapping them up in newspaper to take next time we go.