Sunday, June 22, 2014

A Solstice Celebration & The Messy Mudroom Mission

Saturday was a wonderful day. The weather was perfect (a rarity in NY state) and Blue Moon Circle had a fabulous water-themed Summer Solstice ritual together, followed by a lovely feast. I spent the rest of the day resting, then doing some writing on the new novel I'm working on, interspersed with reading a fab short story my mother wrote, and doing some editing on that. Then we emailed back and forth about it, which was also lovely. All in all, an unusually pleasant and relaxed day.
I finally figured out how to put up pictures of the witchy gang while still preserving everyone's privacy :-)

Angel food cake with fresh local strawberries and homemade whipped cream. Yum.
 I was going to take a lazy day on Sunday--the plan was to relax and write, and not do much else. But then I woke up with more energy than usual (probably thanks to the ritual the day before) and the urge to Get Something Done. So I called my wonderful friend Ellen (who will work for wine, bless her) and asked her if she could come over and help me finally tackle the messy mudroom.

You have to understand that, over the course of the last year or so, I have cleaned and cleared almost every room in the house--getting rid of clutter and stuff I don't need any more, reorganizing and neatening what was left. The only room left is one upstairs (which was the craft/crap room, and is now going to be mostly storage...as soon as I finish sorting through the last bunch o' crap). And the mudroom. Oy.

I'd done part of the mudroom too--reorganized the shelf where all the tools and nails and electrical bits live. But the rest of it was still pretty much a disaster, including loads of cobwebs (the spiders seem to love it out there) and some rodent droppings in awkward places. It was so overwhelming, I kept putting off dealing with it. But it is the space people enter and leave the house through, and that's about the worst space to still be a mess.

Here's what it looked like when we started:



Most of that stuff actually needed to be in there, but boy, was it a mess. So we literally took everything out (except the washer, dryer, and freezer, and the one shelf unit I'd already done, which is to my left as I took the picture). Everything. The shelves got washed off, the floors and walls got swept (I lost count of giant spiders at about a dozen...but there might have been some girly shrieking from time to time as I stumbled across yet another one), and the ragged old plastic taken off the window.
 Look! The walls are yellow! (That's Ellen, heretofore to be referred to as Saint Ellen.)

Then we rearranged the shelves into a placement that worked better and made the room look larger and less cluttered, and put All the Things BACK. (Except for the two bags of garbage we collected in the process.) This is what it looks like now:




It makes me so happy--I keep walking out there to look at it. I can find everything, get at the stuff I need to (like the step stool in corner by the freezer that was impossible to reach), and it is CLEAN. Happy sigh. All that's left to do is go out there with a sage smudge wand and give it a little extra boost.

I gave Ellen a bottle of wine (and let her do two loads of laundry while we were working, since she doesn't have a laundry room) along with my undying gratitude. And then took a nap after she left. Man, that was a lot of work. But so worth it, since it is now a pleasant space for people to enter and leave by. Much better energy by far, not to mention just plain nicer to look at.

The rest of the day is going to revert to my original plan of relaxing and writing, along with some leftovers from yesterday, and maybe even a glass of wine. I think I earned it, don't you?

14 comments:

  1. Lovely post and blog!
    Happy solstice to you <3
    Sarah

    ReplyDelete
  2. What an excellent solstice present to your house!

    Mary Anne in Kentucky

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It was! I really had the feeling that it was important to do some symbolic cleaning for the holiday. Mind you, I was thinking of just sweeping...

      Delete
  3. But this is so much better than a sweeping! This is mitchiewitch - I linked from Reinventing Fabulous to see your transformation. A mere sweeping would be undone by the end of the week and this organization could be permanent.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi mitchiewitch! I noticed you at ReFab and wondered if you were one of the witchy folk :-)

      And yes, this is much more powerful!

      Delete
  4. You and Saint Ellen did a wonderful job. The space looks lighter and brighter and beautifully organized. What a great way to start the summer.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I love the way if feels so much lighter and brighter. I was actually thinking that the paint had faded, but once it was revealed it was just fine!

      Delete
  5. Looks great! I think that the last year or so astrologically, has been about doing just this. Letting go of what no longer served us, and organizing what does. I've been getting my house down to basics and settling in on more permanent arrangements that just require simple cleaning maintenance versus my old method of constant rearranging due to either too much clutter or furniture pieces that just didn't work. Glad you had a great solstice and I love your blogs :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nice to know I'm doing the right stuff--and that I have such good company!

      Delete
  6. Loving that cat picture above the washer/dryer!

    My summer solstice has been a bust. The entire week was ice cold, I was wearing a sweater only a few days ago, and we had a frost advisory for about three nights in a row. Summer? What is summer? Haha.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The picture is a print of famous museum painting, but I don't remember who the artist is.

      We got off to a really cold start this spring, but frost advisory on the solstice? That's just rude! Where do you live?

      Delete
    2. I tried looking up the painting, but all I got were hilarious results of people adding cats into famous paintings (I especially enjoyed the Mona Lisa clutching an irate cat)

      I'm in the Eastern Idaho area and, while we get some weird weather to the point you run your car's heater and air conditioning within six hours of each other, the frost advisory was a bit much. Then again, we've actually had snow falling on the 4th of July!

      Delete
    3. We have a (only slightly exaggerated) statement here in upstate NY: We have two seasons...winter and the 4th of July :-)

      Delete

ShareThis