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?