FUN trip to WV and NOT FUN garden shed deep clean!

If I get to choose between a 2 day conference in DC without our kids and 2 days in wild, wonderful WV at my parents' Mountain House of Hope with our kiddos and dear friends, the decision will not take long to make! This January we didn't have to choose, as my parents graciously watched the farm two weekends in a row! 

So Thursday a little over a week ago we headed to WV following Kali and Terah's yearly check ups. There was nothing really noteworthy about those other than Terah growing 5 inches since her last one, almost pushing the shot out of her leg having not fully internalized yet how much relaxing helps shots go better, and how very cute she was reading letters for her first ever eye test. Mostly, we were just happy that hurdle between us and a weekend (without my computer) in WV was behind us!

Good friends from college and their three fun and spunky kids joined us Fri-Sun. While the snow we hoped for came to us in the form of drizzling rain, sleet and the occasional snowflake, there was still more than enough fun to be had! It really was a tried and true break!! We played games and more games and more games - Dutch Blitz, Spoons, Codenames, Five Crowns, Bananagrams, Boggle, Monopoly, Golf, Go Fish, 7 Up 7 Down, Pit and probably more that I'm forgetting. We ate lots of amazing food, popped many rounds of Tangly Woods' popcorn, and enjoyed lingering conversations around the table. Two puzzles were put together, there was one stint of outdoor play and W and I got to go for one hike just the two of us! We also enjoyed a violin concert and were glad mom and dad's house didn't come down with a very energetic game of "soup soup" (a homemade variation of tag/hide and seek).  

It was a very special weekend with kindred spirits! Life surely has changed considerably since our times hanging out just the four of us in the older generation nearly 20 years ago. Some of the dreams we talked about then have now come to fruition. And there are 6 beautiful new people that have added richness and complexity to our lives. I know our family of 5 hopes we do it again!!

It was not the smoothest landing home. It's hard to go from a fun and relaxing weekend away from all the demands of "normal" life, and then dive back into the week. My office days were particularly taxing and I was yearning for a few days on the homestead to try to feel a bit more grounded again. We had slated Thursday and Friday of this week for our next deep clean project. The night before we checked weather and all looked good so we decided to tackle the garden shed.

Thursday morning, Jason and I started the day reading and having coffee together, then split chore responsibilities and were ready to dive into emptying the shed (with some little helpers coming to join us early on in the process). Here's a taste of what we were unloading but the pictures really don't do justice to the task ahead of us!

The unloading part is always the easiest and fastest part of the project. Everyone was in moderately good spirits as the day got underway. But some of the stress the adults in the home had been carrying all week didn't magically dissipate as we got into the project and it was clear there was going to be some hard work involved. We wanted to do it together because the hope is that I will be using the garden shed more and more and so knowing what is where and assisting in organizing seemed important. But to date it has largely been "Jason's space" to maintain and use and so it was not only him opening up the project to others but also having us all inspect all the stuff that had accumulated and ask him to make decisions about lots of things, while also keeping us busy with jobs. Oh, this is not his ideal set of circumstances/responsibilities!!

I think we would have probably done ok if the weather predictions from the night before had held. We got everything out, cleaned it (the girls helped scrape chunks off the floor) and were ready to start moving things back in before lunch.

BUT right as we were taking out the last few things, snowflakes started falling. I assumed it was just a passing cloud with a few flakes to drop on us and would soon stop. To the contrary, it started coming down more and more and even laying on things. This was not in the plans. That, coupled with kids starting to get cold and pesky, about did me in. Now there were kids asking for things and interrupting our concentration on deciding where to put things. And then there was needing to decide what order to do things in partly based on what would be most messed up by getting snowed on. Ugh! Honestly, I was out there already thinking about this blog post. The deep cleans of the rooms of our house had hard moments too but they were also a lot of fun, such amazing fast progress, and very notable differences in our day to day home environment. This round of deep cleans feel much more challenging in a number of ways: they are spaces we don't all use equally, they are spaces that haven't been cleaned much and have slowly accumulated a lot of stuff in the fullness of our farm life, and they include lots of hard decisions. It is not so easy to just ask,"does this piece of wire bring me joy" and then base your decision on that answer. Many of the things don't bring us immense amounts of joy but are very practical OR if we keep a certain thing around we might save ourselves a trip to town later on (which would in fact bring us joy!).

We finally had to break for lunch (or else it would have soon been supper time) and so that involved Jason putting anything back in the shed that chickens might come by and peck at (them eating small shreds of metal would not have been a good thing). So once again (like the garage), we weren't able to do the pure "put things back one at a time" method with an outdoor/indoor project like this. Daylight and weather are just factors outside of our control!

We left the snow covered and wet piles, and came up to the house. I had to laugh (or I would have cried) as I saw the snow covered laundry. It was one of those days that I had contemplated using the dryer. But I decided to take the time to hang it out. By that point there was no point taking it back in...

By dark on day #1, everything was back in. There were still some things to sort and hang up. That was most of day #2 (yesterday) and Jason gets the credit for that hard work. Due to me giving most of Thursday to this project, I needed to devote more or less all of Friday to my office work. I did feed the pigs for two outside breaks and slipped to the shed to take a look at the progress. SO MUCH IMPROVED! Our front porch is full of things to give away and Jason and Alida are in the shop shed right now working on putting new handles on tools that Jason has wanted to fix for a long time! That has been the beauty of these deep cleans - not allowing ourselves to put broken things back but either choosing to part with them or fix them and make them usable. We may say that the best thing out of this whole project was Jason getting another kids' hoe ready to go for the season with a usable handle so that Alida and Terah won't have to fight over one. Yay!

So for my sister-in-law, Emily, I'll end with the best I could do on before/after shots! I did tell Jason that I think we might need stiff drinks of some kind to make it through the shop shed deep clean!

BEFORE:

 

AFTER: 

 BEFORE:

AFTER:

Ahhhh....