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| You’ll put this away over my dead, fiberglassed body. |
For all that I whine about my home, the place has a ridiculous amount of storage, closets, and crawlspaces. Ceiling fans that wouldn’t decapitate someone six feet tall or over- no. Rooms with miniature doors- yes.
But every now and again, those spaces become crazypants crammed. So yesterday’s Big Dig was tackling Susannah’s closet, Nora’s closet, and the gigantic crawlspace off of Nora’s room.
I hear that some other tackling went on yesterday as well. Sports!
To start, I removed stuff that Nora had [slightly] outgrown…and walked most of them right down to Suzy’s room. Because Nora, at age 2 years and 3 months, just outgrew a pile of 6-12 month onesies and shirts. I am not joking. And her sister, a worldly 4-month old, is totally ready for the 6-month gear.
They will be the same size by Fall.
Anyhow. Nora’s closet was fairly easy, especially since I’ve kept it pretty darned organized since she was but a flutter in my tum (and her closet was festooned with maroon, teal, and eye-popping graffiti). There were a couple of details slowing down the train, however. One was that, since I was sorting a wide array of sizes of which to store, I needed a lot of separate piles. The second reason also influences the first reason; Nora really wanted to help.
There’s no door on Nora’s closet. This is, in part, because a) it’s rather busted and painted red and white and leaning sideways in the garage, and b) Nora likes to play in her closet- things like Shoe Store and Dora the Explorer and Gypsy Pirate.
This made pulling things out even more difficult, as someone would see me remove some items from hangers and decide to pull down more items. In fact, all.
But eventually, I made my way to Susannah’s room. Girl has an awesome closet, which is most likely due to happenstance construction on this house. (I know, I was surprised too.) They shoved a bedroom and closet right up by the foyer and enclosed a little space with glass block windows and crazy shelving. It gets fabulous sunlight- but is also positively Arctic this time of year.
Unfortunately, it’s also the perfect size for suitcases, hanging bags, wayward hardware, and a few [ahem] Spring coats. It has also been known to host a travelling Gypsy Pirate.
So we gave Susannah back her closet. I cleared out toys that, to the best of my knowledge, didn’t belong to anyone. I pulled out all of her newborn to 3-month clothing (yeah, maybe I cried a little, no big deal), and packaged it up into Baby Girl and Gender Neutral- although, let’s be honest. The more I “put things aside for a boy,” the more likely it is that we’ll find ourselves with a third daughter down the road.
Those projects were decently easy to complete. The really hard part came when I had to sort everything into respective bins in the crawlspace…which is where I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. For two years, I’d been putting stuff away in bins as Nora outgrew them. Except, since she’s rather small for her size, it would take forever for her to outgrow 3-6 month pants. Which would, nonetheless, be put away in her “1 year” bin. Because that was the bin I was putting away, now that she was “2 year.” (But still wearing “1 year.”) And, because of the generosity of past nanny families, grandmothers, cousins’ hand-me-downs, and doting aunts (and honorary aunts), the girls’ clothing storage boasts bins and bins for each age range. (It’s like shopping each and every time. And, unless I’m sorting and feeling cross, I absolutely get the shivers over how incredibly cool it is that I will not need to buy my kids clothing until they are eight years of age.)
But, I got it all sorted during the girls’ naptimes. I even found a box of stuff erroneously marked 3T that would kinda sorta work for Nora right now- including a ladybug raincoat and pajamas without holes in the toes. And yes, maybe I inhaled some fiberglass, and- definitely- Ender the cat jumped into a pile of blown-in insulation and caused me to freak out, brain myself on an attic beam, fall out of the crawlspace and onto some [noisy] bags, drag the cat down the stairwell to the kitchen, humiliate him with a sponge bath on his paws and head, and still feel good about the fact that no one had woken up, regardless of my PG-13 language.
So, in total:
-Three organized storage spaces.
-One bin of stuff to donate.
-One slightly traumatized cat.
-One whopper of a skull bruise.
-Zero F-bombs dropped.
I consider it a victory.
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