The Remodel Stress Mess

 

Part of the struggle that we have had in our new place is that there is no storage and no permanent place for things to go.  What this means is clutter everywhere, boxes piled up, temporary solutions, constantly moving things to get to something else, overcrowding, and what feels like the mess multiplying when we start stacking things up more and more.  Add in a lack of closet doors, no trim, 4 years of living in a remodel zone with the dust and dirt and grime...I felt like hit my breaking point.  We have had such a lack of structure, of order, and so much chaos, and change that my brain literally has not functioned well enough to manage.  Something had to change and had to change before the next school year because I just didn't think I could do another year like this.  

We decided to just dig in and work on fixing the home environment.  The problem was, there was literally no place to empty out a space to work on and everything was dominoed.  This included needing to clean out the barn so that things that needed to be stored there could fit.  It got bad, it got worse, I begin to lose it (anxiety, stress, crying), before we slowly started making headway.  

First up, the entry space.  This has been one garbage dump of a room, piled high of all the "things" that we don't know what to do with, outside things that we are trying to protect from mice (animal feed, garden stuff), as well as the pantry space.  It is the hottest room in the house, the most filthy room in the house, and downright embarrassing when we have people enter our home.  It was also the place where we needed to keep our new freeze dryer so that was a newly added item.  The room was so packed, that there wasn't room to walk.

What we decided is that we needed to create two rooms.   It would allow for a little more storage, less dust (behind a closed space), and we could keep things cooler in the smaller room with an air conditioner (necessary for running the freeze dryer with 3 freezers and a fridge also heating up the space).   

So, while I was gone on my homeschool planning retreat, Phil and the children began the long process of removing everything from the room (except the freezers and fridge).  The only space left in the house to walk was a narrow trail to the bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchen.  Phil had hoped to have it mostly done and things picked up by the time I got home.  That was rather ambitious.  It took a full 4 weeks solid of long days and exhaustion and burn out before we begin to put things away and unearth a living space.




YUCK

4 years of farm mud built up





The wall is up!


The big cupboards can now go on the new wall.






I came home and tried not to panic.  All this stuff was sitting out in the driveway (and some of it still is) under the summer sun.


This was after a big clean up and a dump run.

Want to see what the house looked like?








Phil was exhausted.




My basket shelving and hooks are in!

With the addition of the freeze dryer and the increasing concern about making sure we become more self reliant on what we could grow, can, preserve, etc., we had to make an official pantry space.  The studio room became (or would become) the walk in pantry.  This meant that all the studio boxes (and everything else crammed in there because we didn't know where to put it) needed a place to be.  I did a massive clean out and piled the boxes high in the school room.  We had planned to just hang curtains in front of them but I couldn't do more temporary, messy fixes to big problems.  So, a formal closet was built.  And, carpeting that was filthy was ripped out and I decided that carpet and farm doesn't mix and if we were going to replace the flooring in the school room, it needed to be done throughout the house.  

The messy pantry space before I started sorting and organizing it.









We have almost completed 4 little rooms - the entry way and newly created room is put back together with new paint throughout, a utility sink, all trim up and painted, closet doors installed, and painted cabinets.  Then, you enter the school room with its second little entry space.  These are also trimmed out, freshly painted, with closet doors installed and new laminate flooring.  The school room is piled up with additional studio things that I need to find a place for and all the homeschool boxes that I need to unpack.  That is my next project.

Phil is back to work.  He had a weekend retreat and is back full time starting in August.  We still have a few things to finish in the rooms that we fixed and a lot of sorting and putting things away.  We also have outdoor projects that are desperate to be done (goat barn, goat fencing, barn clean out, deer fencing, and we need to paint our house).  We have one month before we start our new homeschool year.  I desperately want to start out with a fresh clean living space and a plan for success (new habits for keeping things cleaned up and put away, better chore lists, better errand running schedule, dedication to home cooked meals instead of take out, etc..)

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