Summer catch up post - 3 of 3

TV room - with no more bookshelves

After the whirlwind of travel and festivities, it was time to buckle down to business. We've got this domino effect going on in our house that falls something like this:

• Kendall buys a high def TV for the family for Christmas.
• To make room for the new TV, all the bookshelves come down in the TV room; the books are boxed up; the boxes are piled into the guest room.
• We paint the TV room, put up the TV and it all looks so darned good with the newly painted walls that we decide not to put bookshelves back up. (Ah hah! says the astute reader, the guest room is now the boxed up book room.)
• Son Devon returns home to live while he goes for another round of college studies (this time in Communication/radio broadcast at Metro State College of Denver) and he needs that guest room. The books must find a new home.
  
• The only room in the house that can possibly house that many shelves is...the basement. The basement is so full of 34 years of accumulated Paula/Kendall/boys' stuff that it has been reduced down to winding paths through the piles...no floor space, no wall space...pretty much no space at all. The basement must be cleaned out! [Note: this was the first agenda item on my Retirement List...but it somehow got preempted by 1) preparing for that wee run to Michigan and 2) too much nice weather to spend days in the basement and 3) pretty much anything else that came along that wasn't cleaning out the basement.]
  

With the pressure on to get Devon into his own room (he and his stuff is crammed into Paul's room at the moment and Paul is due home for a visit in two weeks), the neighborhood offers up a great incentive: a neighborhood garage sale! So, for the last week, we've been industriously - nay, ruthlessly - going through our piles.

Two mongo garbage barrels of trash, two mongo recycle barrels plus a giant box of recyclables, and a back porch of yard sale stuff, we now have a pretty darned tidy basement ...at least on the scale of VaughanMiller tidiness - which comes nowhere near the Good Housekeeping Martha Stewart scale of tidiness - but we're rather proud of ourselves!

(Porch-full of yard sale stuff -on the left above- makes for rediscovered basement walls & floor -on the right!)

So, if anyone is in the vicinity of the Martin Acres neighborhood of the city of Boulder on August 15th or 16th, do check out the yard sales and make us an offer; we're willing to go very very low!