Almost four months after I discovered a water leak in my office, the project is done!

(Okay, there’s some organization I still have to do and boxes I have to deal with, but it’s 95% done and that feels darn good.)

Let’s go back.  So back in July, I discovered a soft spot in my wall and some evidence of water leakage.  After ripping out some carpet, things did not seem good, so I called some repair companies.  Everyone figured the leak was due to some improperly placed nails outside.  No big deal.  Just some simple repairs.

Then the mold abatement company (because you always call a mold abatement company when you have water in your walls for a long time) came in and started the work.  And it turned out to be way worse than expected.

This photo is from after the mold abatement.  The white paint is all part of the abatement process.  But see that weird shape behind the third beam from the left?  That’s rotted away wood.  The white behind it isn’t paint.  It’s the wrap on the outside of the house.  Yes, at this point, all that is keeping the outside out is a piece of plastic and some improperly installed siding.  This was not awesome.

Oh yes, and to do this, I had to take everything out of my office.  You know what an English major with a law degree owns?  Books.  Lots of books.  So many books.

This is only half of the boxes.

So many repairs.  So much time.  Such poor time management from one of the contractors.  And, of course, this was all going on as I was training for Augusta.  There’s nothing less relaxing than coming home after a hard workout and being faced with all of those boxes.

But finally, the exterior work got done, and the week after Augusta, the interior work was done.

And then my office looked like this for a few weeks because I was busy.  I’m a social gal, after all.  I just had to sand and paint, but getting two coats of paint onto the walls took two weekends.  I also had to buy and assemble a new desk (the old one got damaged by the water leak and was no longer stable).  While I was at it, I picked up the filing cabinet that I’ve been thinking about getting for a few years.  I’m a grownup.  File boxes aren’t cutting it anymore.

But this weekend.  This weekend I finally finished it up.  The room isn’t perfect.  I wanted to put in better flooring.  I just have an indoor/outdoor rug that I bought a few years ago placed directly on the concrete floor.  It’s not quite the right size, but it works and I already owned it.

I’ve got to deal with a few things, hang up a few more items on the wall, and deal with the stack of filing that I’ve been ignoring.  I also need to go through all my files before I put them into the filing cabinet.  I’m a bit of a paper packrat and I think there’s some shredding to be done.

But the boxes are out of my living room and dining room.  My house looks so big now!  It’s a much nicer place to hang out in now!

Which is good because thanks to all of this work, I’m broke.

So since so many people thought that yesterday’s post was going to be about a new kitten, here is a picture of my dad with a kitten purrito.

He doesn’t like cats though. Not at all. Nope.

So the cleaning out my house has stalled a bit.  I blame racing.  Apparently, when you have races or 24 hours of cycling or even a ten mile training run and a 25 mile bike ride, the rest of life gets away from you.  Let’s not talk about the dust.  I’m still trying to teach the cats how to dust.  What’s that fluffy tail for if not for wiping dust off of things?

But I thought I’d provide a quick update on my decluttering.  On the advice of a friend, I sent a few clothing items to ThredUp, which is basically an online consignment store.  They pay you for what you send in (shipping is free), then they resell.  I sent in a dress and two pairs of pants and got $15.  Not a ton of money, but I wasn’t wearing them, so hey, free $15!  They resell for probably three times what they gave me, so it’s not a huge markup.  I may check them out for adding items to my closet.

I also put my the bike saddle that came with my tri bike on eBay.  There was no way I was ever going to use that thing, and it was apparently a good saddle (designed for male anatomy), and came out $25 ahead.  Made a tiny dent in the new saddle I purchased.  I could have listed it for more, but I just wanted to get rid of it.

Next up is dealing with the books I’ve sorted out.  I think I’m going to donate them to the library’s book drive, but I need to go through the rest of the books first.  I think those things multiply.

Remember this picture from the other day?  Yep, it still looks like that.  Well, I did take that green sweatshirt out of the suitcase and hang it up in the closet, but otherwise, same thing.  The (very excellent) book is even still in that very spot.  I guess I could say it’s some form of organization, since it’s all in a pile, but mostly, I just have to say that I need to find time to clean my house.

I don’t know how people who travel every weekend for races do it.  My house looks ridiculous right now.  Let’s discuss a few rooms in the house.

The photo is from my bedroom.  What you don’t see is that the bed hasn’t been made since I put fresh sheets on it, which means that all the bedding is untucked and in a giant pile in the center of the bed.  It’s a little nest for me to crawl into at night.  My dresser is covered in various toiletries that went with me on the trips.  Of course, since one trip was by air and one was by car, I took various sizes of bottles.  And none of them has been put away.

My closet looks marginally better, though right now there is a giant bag of clean and folded laundry waiting to be tripped over.  I washed it, but now I have to do something with it. Also, every shoe I have worn over the past three weeks is part of a giant pile on the floor.  Why did I not put them away on the fancy shoe shelf?  I do not know.

My guest bathroom still has all of my triathlon gear hanging in it.  If I want to have guests, I need to remove the wetsuit.  And hose the mud out from the bottom of the tub.

In my living room, you will find my bike trainer and my bike, though not attached to each other.  Neither belong in the living room, and both need to find their way back into the basement.  My bike pump is currently laying in front of the couch.

Last night, I finally emptied the cooler that I took to my triathlon two weeks ago, but the cooler itself is still on the floor, along with a bag that I used as a carry on for my trip this past weekend.  Next to that is a pile of boxes to go out in Friday’s recycling.  And that’s sitting next to a grocery bag of cleaning supplies that I bought on super sale and need to take down into my storage closet.  Last night, I finally emptied the millions of bottles out of my dish drain and put those away, so the kitchen doesn’t look as bad as it could.

The dining room table cannot be used as a table.  It is covered in way too much junk, from wedding gifts to wine bottles to Soda Stream refills to a printer that doesn’t work.

Oh, and if you come over, you can’t walk through the main hallway and have to take a circuitous route to get to the dining room.  Why? Because in the main hallway are grocery delivery boxes (because my groceries came BEFORE their delivery window, which meant they got left in cooler boxes on my doorstep, and those have to be returned) and a flat packed dresser that I have to assemble at some point.

Yep.  Completely disorganized.  How do people do it?  Thankfully, I should have time over the weekend to get most of it taken care of.  I hope.

P.S. – This weekend is the Army Ten Miler, my Team Fight race for the year.  If you have a few dollars, every little donation helps.  Thank you!

I had an insanely productive weekend.  I’m not sure where the motivation came from, but I could use more weekends like this.

As I have mentioned on social media, a few weeks back, I came home to find that one of my closet racks had pulled out of the wall.  No surprise – it was pretty crappily done, but it functioned.  However, this was the last straw.  It was time to call in the big guns, spend the big money, and hire a professional closet company to come in and put together something nice.

After all the fun that goes with such a process, I had an install date of July 7th.  I decided that I wanted to paint the walls of the closet a deep blue to go with the white trim and white closet system.

So this weekend, I cleaned out the closet (man, there was a lot of stuff in there, including my junior year prom dress), did some sorting of things to go to charity (not including the prom dress), took down the remaining hanging rods and shelves, spackled and sanded the holes, vacuumed and steam cleaned the carpet, and painted one coat of paint.

On top of that, I ran 8 miles, biked 17, and figured out how to retape my handlebars so poor Ethel doesn’t look homeless anymore.

Of course, the rest of the house is a complete disaster.  I’m hoping to get to that on Monday while I hang out as the closet installers work their magic.

I’m stupidly excited about a new closet.  There is going to be so much space!  I might even hang up my running and biking gear so it’s not all smashed into a dresser drawer.

It’s the little things.