new house dilemma #12

So I've stumbled on the key to finding motivation to clean your home -- get a job where you have to recite a housecleaning script up to 15 times a day. There's only so many times you can say..."for example, we start at the top and catch the cobwebs around the corners of the ceilings"...and not think about how many cobwebs have been spun in your own home. This past weekend, John and I cleaned the entire house. It doesn't look like it though because we also ended up with several new pieces of furniture we were given by a close family member. I use the term given loosely. We've refused receipt of this furniture at least six times over the past three years. The excuses have ranged from, "it's not really our style" to "we don't have room for it", depending on what mood we were in, but one thing was for sure -- we weren't going to take the furniture. Well, at least I thought that was for sure. Friday afternoon, I came home to a room full of furniture -- the same furniture I distinctlly remember turning down six times. A moment of weakness coinciding with pressure from aforementioned family member moving in two weeks? Maybe. John and I facing the reality that we won't be in a position to purchase new furniture for awhile? Also a good possibility. Whatever the reason, it did solve New House Dilemma #12: Not Able To Get Full Box Spring Up Narrow Staircase.

We've tried to solve this dilemma several times without success. We've pushed, pulled, shoved, cussed, all-while-putting-several-new-holes-in-the-walls attempting to get the full box spring up the staircase. We even resorted to swiping a split box spring that someone had put at the end of their driveway for the trash to pick up, only to get it up the staircase and realize it was a QUEEN split box spring. We were so glad to have *any* box spring in our guest room, we convinced ourselves that our guests would find the pyramid bed an interesting adventure...or at least a conversation piece. It's probably for the best that no guests had the chance to test the stacked bed. We've replaced the certainly unstable makeshift bed with two sturdy twin beds (Clark and Kerry: when you visit you'll get to experience what it was like for married couples during the Dick Van Dyke era).

And if cleaning the whole house and rearranging several pieces of furniture was not enough, I also decided this would be a good weekend to switch out my spring/summer and fall/winter wardrobes. This is always a humbling process because I realize that my semi-frequent squawking about "how I don't have any clothes" or "I have nothing fun to wear" are unfounded and stupid. A long time ago I told myself that I was going to live by the rule that everytime I purchased something new I was going to get rid of something old. That rule never took hold in my life. I justify it by saying that I just give a bunch of things away at the end of every season to make up for all the things I bought that season and that it probably works out evenly. Yeah right. Lately I've been contemplating trying a similar giving principle that an acquaintance shared with me -- she removes one item from her house every day in an effort to pare down. How long would it take you to give away everything in your home if you lived by that principle? Maybe I'll try it and let you know.