Heavy Lifting

So for like the past year, Daddoo has been talking about getting the house in 'order.'

Though what 'order.' he wants I'm still not clear on as the house was pretty organized with Mother Dearest there with the 'chaos' in the house often relegated to a back storage room or Daddoo's mancave.

And I'm honestly not sure even he knows what 'order' he wants the house in.
I think he just wants the house to be set up 'his' way. 

Which apparently is a more...minimal feel to it?

I don't know.

In any case.
Last time I was up at the house I helped Daddoo take down a couple of his fishtanks and move one out into the living room for him and reset it up. 

And I noticed, that he was rather productive while I was there helping him.

It wasn't like he was helping me with the fishtanks themselves --mostly because the space they originally were in was a bit too crowded to have more than one person attempting to take it down.
But he stayed busy doing other tasks. Setting up things, cleaning other things. He stayed pretty active while I was active.

And I figured that if he was more active with someone around being active with him.
Then perhaps I should come up a little more often and help him with things around the house so that he could get stuff done quicker.

Because it has been a year.
And parts of the house --namely the basement that's been under renovations for like a year- are still a disaster zone.

And I can get how the whole thing can be 'overwhelming' to do by yourself.

As I have checked in every now and then on plans Daddoo said he wanted to accomplish and such only to find out they weren't done or pushed to later or altered. 

So I decided, with this new year --though Daddoo has been more proactive this month in organizing the house--
That I would do what I could to help Daddoo get the house back in order.

As my siblings are more focused on their own homes and building their futures.

While me....I'm still single and renting a place. So like....I have time? I suppose? I don't know.

But yah. I came up last night with the intention to stay today and help Daddoo with whichever part of the house he wanted to focus on today.

That focus was the back bedroom in the basement.

Though it hasn't really been used as a bedroom since my brother moved out of the house.
Instead it's kinda become the second random storage space to hold random things in. 

And that room was stuffed full of stuff.

Because the renovations downstairs are altering the old storage room into a master bathroom and so all the boxes and things that were in that room had to be moved into a different room.
and then the unfinished half that was used basically for food storage also is getting a facelift and becoming like a kitchenet sort of place. So all that stuff had to be moved.

And that stuff was moved between that back bedroom and what used to be Mother Dearest's library.

-The books are long gone, only a handful of bookcases remain and those are really only there to hold basically all the food storage while Daddoo figures out what food storage he wants to keep.

Honestly though...I can see how people become hoarders.
How things just pile up.
Get covered in dust.
Forgottten.

AS going down into the basement felt a lot like that.

Due to the construction in the unfinished half, there's been a lot of dust kicked up into the air and it's settled on basically everything in the basement. 
And with constantly having to shift and move things...I think Daddoo just got to the point of 'stick it here until I have time to do something about it'
Only...he never had time.

And moving things around again....I found so many things, so many items that Mother Dearest had treasured...just in piles. In precarious places where they could break and be lost.

As Daddoo isn't always gentle when it comes to moving things around. He often gets into the 'i need this thing here right now' and shoves whatever else he doesn't need out of the way to get to what he does need. 

And it was just depressing that.
Seeing everything so dust covered.
Finding things of Mom just...laying there.

So depressing. 

In any case.
Daddoo wanted to work on the back bedroom today.
In that he has a ton of plank wood from a blue pine that my Maternal Grandfather cut when he was a young man. And Daddoo wanted to put that paneling up on the bedroom walls.

Which involved removing the old halfpaneling that have been on the walls since before I was born and had been painted blue by my brother at one point. 

But because that room ended up becoming a storage room because the storage room became the new bathroom....it meant there was a ton of boxes and a ton of things pushed up against said walls that Daddoo wanted to work on.

So part of my job was to empty out enough space from one wall in order for dad to put the new wood up on it. 
And then when he was done with that wall we would shift and move more things away from the next wall -either against the wall that was already paneled, or out into mom's old library area. 

I can see how Daddoo would be so overwhelmed with the basement in general.
There's so many boxes. Holding so many different things. There were boxes of collectable stuff. Boxes of old hobbies that Daddoo hasn't touched in years. Pictures, and furniture. Bookcases holding books from his medical school.. Bottles holding other things....

It's a lot.

But.
We managed to move enough things out of the room to be able to put the wood paneling up.
And while he was doing that, he had me bring more wood planks down from the garage.
So that was a fun adventure in navigating these planks of wood that were longer than I am tall through a maze of cars in the driveway, down a snow covered slope, through the debris filled patio --which was also depressing because that place was soo nice and comfortable and the furniture was fun to sit on---only for it now to be covered in debris and dust and wood piles it's just depressing to have the space be so unusuable. *exhales* 

But yah. I definintely got my workout today.
*shakes head*
Unfortunately no cute guy happened to drive/wander by to see me carrying these piles of wood and offer to help me...but one did hope it would happen. 

The end result though was that we did accomplish what Daddoo set out to accomplish today.
Which was to get the wood up on the walls. 

From what I can tell he's gonna start working on all the different boxes next.
Go through them. Sort them to trash, D.I., Keep, etc. 

We'll see if he makes any progress on that before I come back up in a couple of weeks. 

Part of me feels that I should come up every week and help him out because I know that if I'm there he'll be more active and we can get things done faster.
But I also know myself well enough that if I do that I'll probably end up suffering in the meantime because I can't handle constant work or constant socialness without a day or two of quiet time. 
And if I go up on my day off to work...that would leave only Sunday to rest and that's not always enough for me.

So we'll see.
We'll see how it all goes and if the house can get in 'Dad's order' before Spring hits. 

Until you next see these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!

-Sarnic Dirchi