Room for my sewing machine

You know, we started out to just kind of early spring clean or new year's reorganize or something. The garage door has been falling apart for years and so we ordered a new one and I got a garage door opener! Yea! I know it's lazy as can be, but I've always wanted one. That lead to having to take down shelving near the door so the door people can make it 'wind load' approved. I wish I could write what the guy told me. He had a lazy tongue and he kept saying something that sounded just like 'windowed'. And I thought, yeah, the new door has windows, but why would we have to beef up the framing around the new door for the windows? The old door has windows, too. After much confusion, I finally got that he didn't know how to use his tongue (No, I'm not making fun of a disability. He was just a lazy-tongued macho male that didn't want to explain it to a woman).

So... after that rabbit trail... the shelves had to come down. That meant we had to find a place for all the junk... er... stuff... er important tools and materials shoved onto the shelves. And that would be impossible because our garage was full of stuff from our old house that needed to be garage saled and with Mom sick and passing, not time for garage sales. Okay, now we need to reorganize and go through stuff in the garage to see if there is more to put in a garage sale. Well, Allen's wanted one of those big rolling toolboxes to put all his tools in instead of so many little boxes, so what the heck. We'll go get one and it'll be his Christmas present like the garage door opener is mine! LOL Well, we were thinking the one on sale for $250. It's the big nice one he's always wanted... until he saw the $1400 one on sale for $800. Okay. I talked him into it. It's big and nice and will last longer and surely will hold all his tools.

So we have to order it and get it in. He assembles it and I go to the dollar store for those drawer liners so he doesn't have to buy those craftsman liners. He tells me he's thinking, I'll never have enough tools to fill this up. Well, a couple of weeks later and it's FULL!!!! ... to the brim. It's very organized and that's a good thing. I always get annoyed when I need a tool and can't find it in that garage full of tools. Now, I'll be able to find it... if I can find the 'blanking' keys to unlock it!
so...
garage door ordered.... check....
opener ordered... check...
toolbox bought and tools sorted into it.... check...
more stuff for the garage sale... check...

In the meantime, the old Amana freezer that my parents had for 20-plus years starts making this annoying vibrating sound. We can spend 150 to 200 bucks fixing it and still have an old less efficient freezer, but one that seems to have stood the test of time or we can get a new one on sale for just a little bit more than that, but that may not have the longevity that one has had.... bit the bullet and get the new one. Add the old freezer to the garage sale -- we told them it was old, but froze well. They got it cheap. It was out of our hair.

Okay... planned the garage sale...
In the meantime, Erin decides that she'd rather sleep in Grandma's full-sized bed rather than her bunkbeds that her Daddy built the other girls 15 years or so ago. Okay, no problem. We'll add that to the garage sale. My heart was heavy because they were well-built and held memories, but ... taking them apart and putting them back together in the driveway the last time was once too many... what a pain to assemble/disassemble... so they're history. We tried to give them away, but the family couldn't fit them in the room, so ... They SOLD first thing garage sale morning. The sale went very well and we sold all the big stuff and donated the rest.

Garage emptied of most of the junk.... check...

In the meantime, Erin and Jamie are going to switch bedroom sets. Jamie gets Grandma's and Erin gets her great grandma's furniture that we started with. So Erin and I will sand down the vanity and refinish it. Jamie already finished the chest of drawers (or Chester Drawers, as my daughter teases me about).

Another one of the postponed projects was getting rid of the nasty off-white-- really off-white carpet in the bedrooms. More carpet? No. Stained concrete? Love it, but lots of work doing something we don't know how to do. Ceramic tile? Too much time out of the bedrooms to get that done. So... we decide on laminate wood. Found a good price and good installation price. So now they're coming Monday to measure the rooms. Hopefully, we can put off the installation for a couple of weeks and take a breath.

And Tuesday, they come to install the garage door. Someday we'll actually be able to put the car back in the garage!

So today, Allen gets the shelves down and preps to do the electric wiring for the opener. And.. Erin and I start sanding my grandmother's vanity for Erin's room. We got most of it done today. We both worked hard. Erin prefers hand sanding to using the sander. Go figure. I use the machines for quick work. She did the detail work and did a pretty good job on most of it. I'm proud of her. She also took a break in the middle and made a MEAN salad to go with leftover pizza for our lunch today.

So what started out to be just a few simple changes has now become major remodeling. I never intended to make so many changes so quickly after Mom's passing. It just seemed to snowball.
We're also going to swap bedrooms during the floor changes because we have to empty both bedrooms out anyway and Allen seems to think losing square footage of the room is okay if we gain extra closet space. We'll see. I don't really care as long as there is room for my sewing machine.