The Best Free Workout Ever

We have lived in our house for almost nineteen years.  We first bought our little three level house when Russ was in business school and we only had a dog and three cats.  I knew after about four weeks of moving to Durham that I wanted to stay here so I told Russ that I did not care what he did for a living, but let’s find a way to stay settled and not do the corporate moving around thing.

After Russ graduated we decided we really liked not only our house, but also our yard and our neighborhood.  So in the planning-for-the-future-way-we-are we decided we needed a bigger house for the children we were yet to have.  We added two more levels, not up, just out, with two more bedrooms a bath and a playroom onto the house.  It was like adding a piggly wiggly house onto our piggly wiggly house.

Eventually Carter came along and we put her in the bedroom right across the hall from ours.  We waited a while and no other children appeared.  Not for a lack of trying, but then we got to that point where we realized that Carter was a fairly good kid and we knew the odds of matching her quality were not in our favor.  We also knew that we were too old to have three or four children so we could not average out the good kids with the more difficult ones.  So we settled on an only child family.

The new bedroom section of the house, lacking children, had become known as the lair.  It was the place Russ would go when he could not sleep or had to get up at four in the morning to catch a flight.  He also had a really nice office down in the lair, which was more important before he got his big offices downtown.  Eventually all three of the giant lair closets filled up with stuff we thought was too important to go to the attic, but not important enough to actually use, things like the G scale train set that gets put up around the Christmas tree about every third year, or Russ’ old custom made suits with pleated pants that have waists that are four inches too big for him now.  But the lair is in a part of our house most people do not even know exists so that sort of clutter mattered little.

Carter turned fourteen before Christmas and finally asked us if she could move down to the lair so she could have a bathroom en-suite and a separate study room from her sleeping room.  So that is what she got for Christmas.  Russ was losing his lair and I was the one who had to make it all happen.

This is where the free workout happens.  I have spent everyday since Christmas cleaning out closets and rearranging half our house and it is barley one third done and not a stick of furniture has been moved yet.  It started with the coat closet in the lair entry that was full of old toys, work files, boxes, light bulbs and vases, those things naturally go together don’t they? Then I had to clean out a giant cabinet in the garage.  What does the garage have to do with it you wonder?  I had to make a place to be my new gift-wrapping station that had previously been in Russ’ office closet.  Moving the gift-wrapping stuff meant things had to be carried up a level through the kitchen and down a level to the garage.

Once that was settled I was able to clean out the closet in Carter’s new sleeping room by moving Russ’ old suits to the coat closet in the hall and the large collection of old quilts, feather beds and pillows into three giant chests I bought at Target and put in the attic.  That move entailed going up three levels and around half the house.

Carter finally got in the act moving all her clothes from her old bedroom down three levels across the whole house and into her new closet.  I began to tackle the large collections of books in both the lair bedroom and the office and realized that they needed to go to the shelves in the playroom which were currently full of a college tuition’s worth of American Girl Dolls, their horses, sleighs, carriages, beds, dressers, tables, chairs and trunks and trunks of clothes.

Carter was quick to say she did not need those accessible anymore, so more trunks from Target later and a three level change move our attic now has a full American Girl store displayed in one corner.  At last the books could be moved up two levels.

I also moved all of Carter’s childhood books up to the attic along with her horse figures and swim trophies.  While in the attic I found old lamp shades to bring down with me to throw away and half a life time’s worth of Gourmet Magazines which have been identified for movement somewhere out of the house.

I estimate that I am about one third through this reorganization of just three rooms in our house and it has involved carrying over 134 loads of stuff up and or down at least two stairways and about 25% of it carried up the attic ladder-steps.  Over 23,000 steps have been taken carrying at least twenty pounds.  This does not include the steps used on trips to Target and the ballet of maneuvering coffin-sized plastic trunks through the aisles on a busy shopping day.

All this is being done in a house where you cannot look without seeing a full on Saks Fifth Avenue Christmas window amount of decoration that needs to be taken down and put away before Martin Luther King’s birthday.

So if you don’t see me for a while, stop by the house and make sure that I have not been crushed by the stacks of old clothes Carter has determined are ready to move on or the Betsy McCall fashion designing light up desk that needs to be e-bayed.  I am undaunted by this project because it all counts as more exercise than I could get in a week at a boot-camp type spa and when it get’s done I will feel like I’ve got a new house.