What have I done today? Funny you should ask!

I took down the lights, which I might say was quite a bit harder than putting them up. I did carefully fold them back the way that they came and stored them in a plastic container I had purchased along with the lights for just such purpose. Climbing up and down the ladder was harder because the aluminum was much colder. However, I still worked up a good sweat doing the work.

When I had finished, I was on the phone with a friend talking about my financial plight and she asked if there was anything I could sell on e-Bay. I decided that I would not mind selling the two antique butternut chairs that I have had in my attic ever since I moved here. While I inherited them, they are not near and dear to my heart. Butternut is a blonde wood and everything I have is dark. She said that if I would take photos of them, she would ask a friend who had an antique store to price them and would post them for me.

Well, that meant getting out the ladder, which I had already put away in the basement, and carrying it up to the second floor so that I could climb up in the attic. Once I was up there, I discovered that since a piece of wood fell off the bottom of the attic gable vent there was a direct opening to the outside. Not good, eh?

I found a bit of left over framing wood from a window casing in the basement, cut it to size using my free circular saw (I needed two pieces because of the width), and effected a repair to the problem. What was remarkable was that I was able to cut 45 degree angles on the top piece and straight edges on the bottom piece so that the two fit well against the wood frame the handyman had built when installing a gable vent attic fan two summers ago. [We will not focus on the fact that he should have built a longer frame to cover the bottom portion I had to repair.]

Of course, once in the attic, I felt the need to sweep and dust up there so that it was not quite so dirty. Well, then I ended up dusting all three floors of my house which took just over two hours. I do happen to have 40 antique demi-tasse cups on three different shelves. That coupled with all the antique goodies like opera glasses, cameras, tin type photos was the real time killer.

When I finished, I went to put lemon oil on the chairs to clean them up for the photos. Of course, then I was compelled to lemon oil all the antique wooden furniture I have. Once that was done, I noticed how much of my silver needed polishing, so that was my next task. I have many silver spoons for the teacups and more odds and ends such as frames and bookmarks that I realized. My hands were shaking and my legs aching before I finished.

When I was putting all the silver things away, I realized I needed to clean the wood floors that I had skipped after finishing vacuuming yesterday. That took another hour.

All that cleaning resulted in dirty laundry that needed doing between my pants that took care of much of the dirt on the attic floor before I swept, the dust rags, the polish rags, and the hand towels from washing my hands constantly during all that work.

All this, I thought, just to fetch those chairs from the attic!


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NOTE: My friend D would be proud of my efforts...but I know that she would have found many, many, many more things that needed cleaning here in order to bring my home up to her pristine standards and make my home as beautiful as hers!