Thursday. From My House to Yours.

This morning I woke up and I thought, “I just don’t want to teach school today.”

It’s certainly not the first time that I’ve thought that.

Or thought similarly on other topics.

“I just don’t want to do laundry/cook meals/get out of bed/wash my hair.”

And most mornings when I feel that way, I just do what I have to do anyway.

Like the rest of the world.

I don’t want to make dinner, but I do it anyway.  I don’t want to get out of bed but I do anyway.  (Sometimes I let the laundry and the hair washing slide.)

But today, over a breakfast of Whatever Any Kid Felt Like Having, I decided that I wasn’t going to teach school that day.

I told the kids this decision.  They rejoiced.  Literal cheering.

It was a good day.

It did not go as I expected.

Several rooms in our home are currently in severe disarray and I wanted to change that.

The hall is filled with every item that had been previously stashed/stacked/stored in our under the stairs closet.

That closet had to be cleared to make way for a new and improved heating and cooling system for our home.

The new system is something worth cheering about too.

(And we’re so incredibly grateful for this break in the cold as we have had no heat since Wednesday and will not have it until late tomorrow, cross your fingers.)

But the pile of tools, nails, paint containers and other random gloves, curtain rods, staple guns and whatnot is rather unappealing in our hall.

But I cannot correct that until this weekend so I tackled the other room in disarray.

The girls bedroom.

It’s been a mess since a few days ago when I decided to let Piper create a trundle bed like the sisters in Little House have.

Piper’s unattractive metal bed has never really pleased me and the arrangement of the girls room has always been a struggle.  Removing a giant ugly bed seemed like a good way to de-clutter the room.

Kevin’s on a tight deadline this week and I was determined to conquer the bedroom today so I knew I would have to be both the muscle and the brain.

If I was going to skip school, you can bet I had something else I wanted to accomplish.

It is the kind of bed held together by those little screws whose ends are hexagon shaped – so you have to use that little “L” shaped beast of a tool.  And of the sixteen little screws (or bolts – whatever) three of them were completely stripped.

No amount of cranking and turning helped anything.

The bed assembled is too large to make it through the door and down the stairs to the barn so I had no choice but to get those bolts out of there.

I used leverage and jumping and shoving and twisting and making loud noises.

It wasn’t pretty, I can tell you that.

And I can tell you this too – I’m confident that I sacrificed the integrity of that structure.  It will not be serving us as a safe bunk bed in the future, that’s for certain.

But as of right this very second, half of the bed is in the barn and half of it is sitting – very disassembled – at the top of our stairs.

I guess that means in the battle of Me vs. The Metal Bed, I won.

After cleaning up the carnage of both the bed and what we found under all the beds when I rearranged, we had a mess of a clean up on our hands.

(How does so much junk pile up under a kids’ bed during the course of two years?  It was nasty.)

I sat down with pen and paper and drew out this super tidy arrangement of shelves and crates for the wall of their now more spacious room.   I spent a bit of internet research time looking at shelving units and crates and costs.

Then I thought about our recent heating bill from the reasonable and generous people over at Duke Power.

$391.

(I did call them because I think that’s outrageous for a home with a thermostat set to 57 at night and 62 during the day.  They’re sending a real live person out to read our meter next week.  We’ll see what happens.)

I thought of that number and I looked at prices for clever shelving options and I decided I’d best just look around our house.

There was an ugly pink wooden shelf in a closet.  The hallway closet’s vomited up contents revealed a can of happy yellow paint.  When the shelf and the paint met, they made an agreeable combination.

Next I grabbed two long boards from the barn.  As in, the two long boards used to actually be a part of the barn.  They looked rustic and weathered.  (Because they were.)

I stood in our laundry room/family closet and saw the metal bins holding Otto’s entire wardrobe.

I’ve always thought those metal tubs were too cute to waste away unnoticed in a laundry room.  (I think their original home was in Bergen’s bedroom in our former house.)

As I tend to do, I made more trouble in the second room so I could tidy up the first room.

Otto’s clothing was dumped in a mammoth pile (and it’s still hanging out there now) and I carried the shelves and the boards upstairs, hoping something would work out between all of them.

And I think mostly it did.

I wouldn’t call it glamorous, but I would call it handy, purposeful and free.

The top middle box is actually the bee box from the potential bees that have yet to move in to our home.  (I figure I’ll give it back if they ever actually arrive.)

Our original plan for the evening was to purchase and decorate our Christmas tree.

At the end of this shifting beds, vacuuming floors, sorting toys kind of day, I couldn’t seem to rally the troops to go hunt for Christmas trees.

(Talk about expectations.  A week ago I had wanted to get our tree at the farm in Virginia.  Didn’t happen.  Then I had wanted to go to a local tree farm and buy a tree with a root ball so we could replant it after Christmas.  Didn’t happen.  Suddenly, I have only three volunteers who want to go with me to grab a tree from any old lot we could find.)

We left two at home with Daddy and we drove off.

We snagged a perfectly normal tree from a perfectly normal lot and headed home.

Because of Kevin’s deadline, he asked us to wait until another night to actually decorate the tree so he wouldn’t miss the fun.

I asked Mosely and Piper Finn to gather a few rocks to put in the bucket to hold the tree since I cannot locate the tree stand and I am unwilling (as of now) to purchase a new stand.

They brought me a couple of rocks –

I don’t think they’ll be any room in that bucket for a tree – even the small one I managed to convince the kids to choose.

(Even though it seemed small on the lot, I bet it will still feel giant in our little living room.)

Anyway, who knows if the tree will fit between those rocks (!) or look giant in our living room – because it’s still tied to the roof of the suburban!

Nope – we didn’t complete an official school day.  Half of a broken bed is precariously perched on our landing.  A Christmas tree is resting on the roof of our car.  Our hall is filled with paint cans and assorted tools.  The wind is blowing and we have no heat.

But seriously – I still thought it was a good day.