2023, Family, home, Uncategorized

Hot Mess

32 Comments

We’re in the very last death throes of our bathroom remodel: the time when you realize you need a new shower caddy, a little table, new towel racks, new shade, new curtain……  aarrggghhhh. 

Home Depot feels like it has become our home away from home.  We were there last night for a toilet paper holder, a new shade (we have a new window that is a different size from the old window) and some towel rods.  YA is fairly handy and took on the toilet paper holder on Saturday afternoon.  She didn’t like the size of the anchors to attach the handles so we had to make a trip to the hardware store.  It was the third hardware store trip of the day for me, although the other two trips were about the shower caddy, not the toilet paper holder.

Once we were home, she was able to get it finished up in less than a half hour.  When she called me to look at her handiwork, the photo above is what I saw.  Quite a bit of mess for a toilet paper holder.  She’s not traditionally as good about cleaning up after a project, but she did straighten up.  I suggested she could clean up more and she reminded me that she’ll need these same tools for the towel racks.  Good thought.

When I had to take a picture of the big mess for the little project, she objected and then said “why didn’t you take a picture of the holder?”  So… voila:

Are you good at cleaning up your messes?

32 thoughts on “Hot Mess”

  1. It depends, mostly, whether the mess is in a shared area or not.
    When I am done making dinner, usually the only items not cleaned are the pots or pans holding the food and the dishes we use to eat it. Everything else I wash along the way.

    In my office, however, and in my workshop things tend to accumulate on horizontal surfaces until the space is unworkable and then I do a major cleanup. But those are spaces where only I have to work.

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  2. Today our trusted home decorating store person is coming to measure the basement for the new carpet. Our basement has been a disaster since Husband flooded part of it with the garden hose last June. The mitigation company and the insurance company finally agreed on how much compensation we would get. We are also having all new doors and baseboards put down there.

    My desk at work is usually full of piles of paper that I sort through every so often.

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  3. RIse and Shine, Baboons,

    VS, that bathroom looks great, which you must need to hear after all the time and money the project required. You will love it.

    I do clean up after my messes. Lately that has been a focus since I have had a number of small projects on a “ToDo LIst” that had been awaiting my retirement. One of them was to install roll out devices in the lower cabinets to hold things like pots and pans lids and bakeware. I was weary of having to crawl on the floor to retrieve stuff in those lower cabinets. Like your “finish the bathroom” project, it required drilling and screwdrivers (not the alcoholic kind–but that became appealing) that left sawdust, so the vacuum was stationed nearby. Then when I was finished I mopped the kitchen because when I was eye-level with the floor it all looked pretty dirty.

    OT–Last week Lou received a letter from our Long Term Care insurance company apologizing for their error, and I quote, “It appears an oversight occurred that resulted in terminating the policy due to death”. Oooops. I swear neither of us noticed that he had passed on, but given the recent number of deaths in our world, we don’t want to tempt the fates. They say they are working on correcting the error. Phew. What a relief.

    I will attempt to post this, but WP is in a mood today.

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    2. Jacque… YA installed the first of two “sliders” for the vanity cabinet last night. Looks good – if you need advice, she’s available!!

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  4. All messes are mine. All cleanup duties are mine. The kitchen is the main focus of concern for me. During the day I clean up as I make them. But since I eat at 8:30-9:00 at night, I am often too tired to bother. so I usually waken to a few dishes to clean, unless I loaded the dishwasher the night before.
    I have a schedule for the rest of the house. Yesterday was vacuum day. The day before was toilets day. Today was mop day. Tomorrow will be tubs day. I delayed them a bit because my daughter and family are staying over Wednesday night.
    The bed in my second bedroom where my TV and computer are is my office. The bed is my desktop. It goes through a cycle of growing chaos to straightened. Wednesday I have to clean it off.
    The rest of the house is clean, except not as dusted as it could be, but in a bit of chaos. I am still downsizing, which means things are scattered about a bit as I decided what to tras, to store, to donate.
    Then I have to do a bit of straightening and cleaning in Sandy’s apartment. They again have a good cleaner, but the cupboards are mine to take care of as are the flowers and such.

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  5. I am diligent in the kitchen, and like others, clean up as I go when cooking. If I can’t get to the dishes (we don’t have a dishwasher), I make sure to have soaking water in them, makes it so much quicker when I get there.

    But if the mess is out of sight, not so much, hence the basement always waiting for a good vacuum. And this year even the gardens suffered from neglect.

    And billing messes like the dental one I’m wading through right now, where the insurance company hasn’t communicated in a timely manner – these drive me up the wall. And I have a hard time allowing myself time to (still) finish the new email address project. Just feels like such a waste of time to do electronic ANYTHING.

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    1. I spent over half of my life in the “who needs a made bed” camp. But for some reason (that I don’t even remember now) about 20 years ago when YA was little, I decided that I would see what would happen if I made my bed every morning for a couple of weeks, if it made any difference to my life. And I found that I liked it so I’ve kept it up. Not trying to recruit anyone to my way of life.

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  7. I am a clean as I go person in the kitchen only. When I’m working on cooking projects, I don’t like to have a whole bunch of dirty stuff left to deal with after the project is finished. Elsewhere in the house is a whole nother story, especially my studio.

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  8. Sandra loved making the bed. Right down to putting things like trays over the top spread.
    I used to mess up the bed by the way I slept. Now I don’t at all. I get up and fold everything back into place. But changing the bedding is very painful. I spread it over the day.
    The past-their-prime 50-foot-tall trees 30 feet from the building now drop branches in every strong wind. Mary next door and I share that clean up task. The owners do not want to pay to have them cut down. They will fall against the building one day.

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    1. Twice a year, I completely un-do my bedding… sheets, quilt, pillows, allergy covers and dust ruffle. All washed in hot water and dried in a hot dryer. (This was recommended to be by my very first allergy doctor.) This takes most of a day to get everything off, washed, dried and then re-assembled. If YA is home, that helps a bit with the wrestling with the mattress and box spring.

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  9. I make and clean up my own messes. Like others who have commented, I clean up the kitchen as I go (not that I make that many messes in there since I am a very basic cook). I don’t like clutter anywhere in my little condo so I keep that to a bare minimum at all times. I used to reserve one day a week to cleaning the whole house but now I have sort of reverted to Clyde’s method. I make my bed every morning – just having a made bed makes the house seem neater.

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  10. My jobs are, indeed, followed by messes. I’m reasonably good about cleaning up the job site, but gather up the tools and dump them in the garage until enough jobs have made tools hard to find. So every couple months I go out there to put things away and straighten up. It works for me, so far.

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  12. I live with The Birds and in the same room. They are mine and I am theirs so the mess is mine as I have the ability to clean up. The Birds poop a lot but my aviary collects most. We are free flighted after lights on early morning. A little sprites bottle cleansing “accidents”

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  13. My kitchen is so small that I really have to keep up on the dishes as I go. There’s no room for anything I’m not using on the countertops. Keeping up on the dishes has become a habit.

    Other areas of my little condo are more cluttered. I still have way more than I need. I do try to get rid of stuff I’m not using but it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

    Then there are my numerous ongoing projects — the dining room table is half covered with beading projects. Another third of the table has paperwork, books, and other information that I need for whatever it is I’m trying to work on – right now I’m figuring out Medicare. There is only one place setting left for me to eat meals. I prefer to go enjoy meals outside on the deck but those days are rapidly disappearing. I really should conquer the dining room table.

    Next to the table is a secretary-style desk with my laptop and an old spindle with my receipts. There are some old school phone books shoved in behind my laptop. I also have some CDs on it and some music paraphernalia like guitar tuners, a box with capos and picks in it, and some of those wall adapters for plugging in your iPad/iPhone, etc. Next to that desk are three ukuleles and two mandolins and a music stand. Next to those are antique wooden fruit boxes filled with books. I’m not really willing to part with any of this stuff although some would wonder why, and how I can stand living in such a small space with so much stuff. It’s kind of the way I am. I know where everything is this way.

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  14. I said above I do my schedule every 18 days. It’s every 16 days, not that 2 days is a big difference. But remember no one ever enters this apartment but me, except that today the manintenance man ,I see, sneaked in to replace the garbage disposal I seldom use. But it was quite clean under there. I do often mop more often if I spill something in one of the hard floors then may as well do all three. Yes, the weak spot is the sheets. Clean sleepwear every night though I think covers for it.

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  17. I clean as I go in the kitchen, and building the last college set, I suprised myself how often I was vacuuming
    sawdust. But it’s better than walking through it and tracking it all over. And it helps to have multiple small vacuums around so it’s easy to just ‘grab one’.
    But my shop project at home… other than the ‘once over’ with the leave blower every now and then, I don’t stay as clean I have tools all over and it’s driving me nuts. The other day I thought to myself, DON’T BUY ANY REPAIR PARTS UNTIL YOU HAVE A PLACE FOR THEM!
    Just gotta get through this week. Or maybe next. Or maybe concerts on Dec 7 and 8. Almost there!

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  19. Technology is so great right until it isn’t.

    Two of my computers have turned against me and WordPress. Or it could be the 14 tabs I have open.
    Writing a term paper before the internet would certainly have been more cumbersome what with actually going to the library and gathering books and all… not that there’s anything wrong with that, I have books from the library, but that would be harder at 2 AM.

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