Home Improvement Week

I keep declaring that it is Home Improvement Day (or week or month) around here. I keep making lists of things that need to be done and then demanding that they get done. The most notable thing that got done was staining the deck, and I must say that I am proud how spiffed up our house got simply from having a pressure washer for a few days.

Despite that, the list making has continued, and if anything, it's growing even longer. Yesterday, Jared was kind enough to humor me and get some simple things done around the house that I've been nagging him about for weeks. We set up the bed so that the box spring isn't ugly and showing (you'd have to see our bed to understand). He got the cords sorted out on the DVD player and TV in the bedroom so that it doesn't look like technology is going to suddenly come alive and take over planet Earth. Jared even went way out of his way to put the closet doors back on their tracks and repair the tracks so that they won't fall off and kill me or a child. There are many other small tasks that got done, but I'm really starting to feel like progress is being made.

It feels like someone lives in our house again. In fact, I should have done all this stuff when I moved in. Organization seriously is a wonderful thing. When everything has a place and everything is in the place that it has, it starts to become easy to keep the house clean. I've always had random piles of stuff around waiting for a home to be found for them.

I spent yesterday scrubbing the dust, dirt, fingerprints and fly specks off of walls and doors. All the doors in the house (except the front door) are super clean and spotless. You know I am a crazy pregnant lady looking for spotlessness. When was the last time you put cleaning the doors in your house on the to-do list?

Today, we went to a birthday party for a friend's little girl. When we got back I declared that I was very tired and that I didn't feel like making any progress on the house. Jared told me to take it easy.

The next time he saw me, the living room and dining room was completely torn apart. I decided it was time to handle the windows. Nico did help clean the windows while she was here, but the entire effort was eradicated when the porch got pressure washed. The windows got super wet and the residue from the deck got stuck to the windows (and the sides of the house).

I got the broom out and cleaned off the sides of the house and then went into a deep clean of the windows. I cleaned the sills of the windows as well as the tracks. I cleaned the blinds of all the windows as well. I even took all the screens off and brushed them off and washed them down.

Once every surface around the windows was clean, I managed to clean all the windows on the inside and the outside. What a crazy woman. I also decided the curtains weren't clean enough either so I took them all down and washed them. It was not my favorite project at all, and I've only done about 2/3 of the windows in the house. All the hard and tall windows are left. I was planning on hiring someone to help me do the tasks that I thought HAD to be done but that I still found unbearable. Unfortunately, since we did the deck on a whim, it's not in the budget, so I'll buck up and get it all done myself. There can't be THAT much more on the list can there?

Jared's last project is a pretty big one. Whoever caulked our house did an incredibly TERRIBLE job at it, and the caulking around 90% of the house is completely coming apart or messed up. After 2 attempts, Jared decided to try to find another way to get it done. I just can't wait until all the surfaces of my house stay together. We've got an ant problem that would be solved if someone could properly caulk a baseboard.

That's my whining for now. I hope to get a lot more done over the next week, but God knows the list goes on and on.