Larry and I had a great time this weekend cleaning out the laundry room and the mud room (it’s funny how our definition of “a great time” has evolved over time, but I digress).
Let me start by saying we have a wonderful nanny/housekeeper, Cicely, who is like a part of our family and has been with us since Jamie’s birth. My only issue with her, from a cleaning point of view, is that she does not like to throw anything away. So I save my “purging” projects for the weekend, when she goes home and I am not under her watchful eyes. Seriously, I can’t even throw away old food in front of her, she gets really upset like the leftover pizza we forgot we stashed in the garage fridge 3 weeks ago is really a valuable commodity and must be saved!
I, on the other hand, LOVE the act of throwing things away, as detailed previously in this space when I declared my love for dumpsters. This is the central incompatibility between me and Cicely, but frankly our relationship has been working pretty well for nearly 6 years so I don’t think this is going to break us up.
Cicely almost keeled over when she saw our newly cleaned laundry room when she arrived at our house Monday morning. I can’t imagine the anxiety she must have felt when thinking about all the old detergents and random cleaning products that had been disposed of. Some of them had been left there by the previous owners of our house… and that was 4 years ago… just to give you an idea of how long it’s been since we cleaned out that room.
It looks amazing, and even better, you can walk into the room without bashing you toe against one of the many extra dining chairs/old storage trunks/unused laundry hampers we were storing in there, for some unknown reason.
My next project: tackling the cookbooks. I estimate I have about 50 of them on my cookbook shelves currently. Meanwhile I actually use 10 of them at most on a regular basis. That means 40 books cluttering my shelves, they must go!
Cicely sounds just like my husband. He has 4 plastic storage bins in the basement that were placed there when we moved into our house. That was 12 years ago! But every time I say he needs to get rid of them, he refuses. “There’s good stuff in there!” he will exclaim. Yeah! Good stuff you have not looked at in 12 years…sure Honey. LOL!