We have FULL day of work ahead of us. We need to get as much stuff accomplished as possible while we have the extra hands and the container so we’re hoping we can fill it up by the time they come to get it on Tuesday….and there should be plenty of the stuff in the house and storage rooms and everywhere else to get accomplish that but we’re not really sure if we’ll have the time to get it all sorted out.
In addition to our two friends who came in from Munich last night, another friend will also be dropping by around noon although she won’t be staying overnight since she lives nearby.
Since I started with the storage rooms yesterday, I figured that was a good place to continue on this morning. While the girls were working on that, the guys started to take out some of the bigger stuff in the barn such as pressed particle board pieces and so on. Since the guy was a woodworker in addition to being a collector in general, he has kept lots of pieces of furniture that have fallen apart or which he has used pieces for on something else, etc. The barn workshop is piled high with more intricate wood pieces from staircases and chair backs…there’s no telling what we’ll do with all of them but we certainly aren’t throwing the nice pieces away since you never know when you might have a brilliant idea to use them…or we might even be able to sell them. 😉
In the storage rooms, we found a myriad of things, ranging from a box of individually wrapped toothpicks and dozens of light bulbs…to a little mouse carcass. I’ve probably mentioned before that there are tons of containers of rat poison under shelves and on top of shelves and in the corners of rooms and just about anywhere else you might think of. I have yet to see any rats but this little mouse was definitely dead for a LONG time. He was shoved in the back of a bookshelf behind a bunch of other junk and I was oh so thankful that I was wearing gloves when I pulled the stuff out of the shelf and saw the little skeleton attached to it all. It really was only a skeleton left, no fur or anything else and it was so perfectly preserved that I almost thought about keeping it…but what do I need a mouse skeleton for? So in the container he went.
Once we had the storage rooms mostly cleaned out, we moved on to the workshop which is to become the kitchen. This room not only has quite a few woodworking tools left in it but there are several cabinets full of various things he used to repair, rebuild, build and who knows what else. We probably have 100 different types of screws and nails now, almost a full box of just about every size in existance…and there were jars full of nails and screws which had come out of other things or been found here and there and so on. My grandfather who passed away many years ago also had this same affection for pieces of old watches and clocks, screws, nails, bolts, wing nuts and so on. Whether he would ever have been able to find the exact one he needed at the right moment is beyond me but most people know their own clutter better than a stranger so perhaps the previous owner knew just where everything was in his shop.
The third girl showed up so the girls were finally outweighing the boys although the boys were still taking on the much tougher jobs. Hubby decided he would be really brave and started to clean out the chicken coop which we intend to use as a covered patio when we finally get settled in. The coop was full of feathers and straw and bird waste and certainly was not pleasant to be around. We bought think rubber gloves and masks for this exact purpose but I man certainly can’t be reduced to using something girls like a face mask lol. Since we had the container at the house already, we figured we might as well make good use of it and that we definitely did. I wouldn’t want to be “dumpster diving” in that trash pile later on – ewww. Cleaning out the coop also required removing and breaking up the various bird houses and benches that were in the room which was probably the guy’s favorite part of the process. They got to use sledgehammers and whatever destructive tools they could find to smash up the “furniture” so that it wouldn’t take up half of the container. Once most of the stuff is swept out of the coop, we will eventually power wash it and probably use some sort of strong cleaning solution to sanitize the area a bit so the dog doesn’t get any ideas about rolling in something or eating something or whatever she might come up with.
Once that not so little project was completed, the guys moved on to the barn where they proceeded to take down a framework which used to hold an old carriage. Unfortunately, this was another item which we never got to see before it was sold off but judging from the rest of the things we’ve seen so far, we figure it must have been very nice.
