We were on such a roll after our efforts to get ready for Tyler that we kept on going. Everything needed to get done anyway, so why not do it all now, we figured. Of course, we’re paying the price these days because we’re totally wiped out, but at least we feel fantastic about all we got done.
Window cleaning
How often do you clean all your windows, inside and out? Most folks I know cringe at the thought. I’ve even had cleaning ladies who won’t do windows. We have a lot of windows, too, so it’s not a small job. But I felt so good seeing Tyler’s windows clean that I spent a few days in mid February, during gorgeous cool weather, cleaning all the windows myself; yes, inside and out.
It’s not in memory when they were last cleaned, and the dust and grime had slowly accumulated, so the amount of light in our rooms increased by a dramatic factor when they were finally clean and sparkling. We’re still enjoying it.
Yard work
While I did the windows in February, Chelsea tackled the yard, or more specifically, tackled the raking of the leaves. To orient you to the size of the job, we have about a third of an acre, with seven good-sized oak trees, six mature palm trees, two ponytail palms, one fan palm, a huge Hong Kong orchid tree, a frangipani tree, and two citrus trees; with the entire yard edged in various shrubs and vines, including huge sections of bougainvillea.
I helped with raking and bagging when I finished the windows – we had a final count of forty huge bags of leaves. Only a month later we had another round of leaf raking, accumulating another total of eighteen bags.
In Florida the joke is that if you stick a pencil in the ground, it will grow. This winter we’ve had more rain than we can remember in ten years of living here, with much cooler temperatures, and the old adage of growing pencils has come to mind again. Our trees have leafed out tremendously, the vines and shrubs are growing madly, and we’ve had a pollen year that is not to be believed.
The pollen is so bad that we’ve had a solid carpet of the fluffy golden brown twirls for several months, covering the cars, lawn and driveway. The oak trees were particularly vigorous in their growth and resulting pollen, so we had more than our fair share of grief.
A few days ago we couldn’t stand the pollen carpet any longer so we tackled the mess with a blower, several rakes, and a pile of bags. We racked up the count total by another eighteen bags! That, my friends, is a grand total of seventy-six bags in an eight-week period.
Another major yard project was clearing out the masses of bougainvillea, vines and shrubs that had gotten out of control in our absence. If you know bougainvillea, then you know how nasty and sharp those thorns are – by the time we finished the two-day project, we looked like we’d been in fights with jungle cats.
Shed and porch
Though we’d done quite a bit of work on cleaning out the shed last fall, we took it to the next level in March. All those bits and pieces of wood and old doors and other mish-mash, the things we kept all these years because we knew we’d use them some day, all got dragged out for bulk trash pickup.
We did the dirty job of going through ten years worth of paint cans, tossing everything disgusting into the hazardous waste pile, and identifying the remaining cans.
Our shed door was in bad shape when we moved in, but it’s always been at the bottom of a constantly long list of things to fix. The bottom piece was broken and finally fell off, so after several years of dealing with massive numbers of bugs and lizards inside, Alex one day found an old piece of wood and hammered it over the hole.
We loved it, as our lizard population dropped to zero (as long as we’re careful to keep the door shut) but we never got around to painting it. That afternoon of sorting through paint cans, I found the original paint; two days later the shed door color matched, top and bottom, for the first time in five years or more.
In late 2005 I had a rehab guy put in a new closet and bathroom in my bedroom. What was promised as a one-week project still wasn’t finished nearly five years later; the original guy got lost in a sea of alcohol and drugs and divorce issues and dropped out of our lives.
Meanwhile we’ve had all the construction materials to finish the job carefully stored out in the shed. No longer! We moved on what we wouldn’t use, threw out what went bad, and used up the rest when we finished off the construction project.
One of our final projects was cleaning out the cabinet on the porch – I’m sure we all have a cabinet like it – all the small things go in it – the things that we can’t really find another place for, but we don’t want to throw away. The cabinet was my job – I made all the tough decisions. We cleared out so much stuff that we were able to take off the top part of the cabinet (it came in sections), so now we have half the size to store junk. It is squeaky clean.