to-do list

Sep 2, 2013

We are making progress on our giant to-do list. Slow progress, but progress nonetheless. I wanted to be to this point last Monday, but this broken foot is giving me a great opportunity to grow in my patience levels and to be okay with things not moving as quickly as I want them to. Have I told you we are doing a bedroom rearrangement? Well, we are. Keziah likes rearranging her room (just like her mama) and at the beginning of the summer she asked if her papa would build her a daybed that she could move around whenever her heart took a fancy to a new look (her current bed is a full-size bed with storage drawers under it and it has to be taken apart to be able to moved). She wanted it to be white and couch-like and wooden and cute. She also didn’t want it to take up much room and she didn’t want bunk beds or anything big and bulky. He promised her he would do it and she started looking up bed plans. At some point early on in this undertaking, we decided we should move Annesley out of Fisher’s room and into Keziah’s room…but Keziah refused to have Annesley sleep with her because Annesley likes/needs/wants to rub whoever she is sleeping with ALL.NIGHT.LONG. So, we all decided a trundle bed would be a great solution to that problem. Then Jen offered her metal daybed to Keziah for free. Kez, being a mastermind at earning money and spending it wisely, jumped on the opportunity at spending little moolah. But then she decided she really DID want a wooden daybed. So Richard and I took metal daybed parts and combined it with one of the wooden daybed plans and wrote our own plans with enough room for the trundle underneath and several weeks ago we started building in the wee hours of the night.

In the midst of all this bedroom rearranging we decided we should take Fisher’s (formerly Blythe’s – she lost it in the last great bedroom rearrangement) loft bed down and put Keziah’s storage bed in his room. Our home only has four bedrooms, so there isn’t a dedicated room for guests when they come and we often have a houseful of people all needing beds. No adults can sleep in Fisher’s bed because it is quite a climb to get to it and is only about 20″ from the ceiling. If we put Keziah’s bed in Fisher’s room, an adult (or even two if they are friendly) can sleep in his room, two-three people can sleep in Keziah’s new daybed/trundle arrangement, two-three can sleep in Blythe’s bed, and we have two cots and two couches for the rest. I think this will be a better arrangement for our guests, but boy, howdy is it a lot of work!

While all of this has been going on, I have decided I absolutely must have a clean bedroom and closet in order to keep my sanity. I cannot homeschool these precious little ones another year with my room in constant disarray. Last year was a nightmare, but I didn’t have enough time, energy, or capability to get it done, so we survived. So, I have been cleaning…a little bit every day for the past 21 days or so. Here is our list of what has been done and what needs to be done.

Accomplished/Finished/Solved

• Our bedroom is clean! For the first time in a long time, it is clean. Actually clean, top to bottom and left to right.
• Piles of clothing and household goods that are not needed anymore have been taken to DI.
• Taken Fisher and Annesley’s bed apart AND stored in the garage until Blythe would like to use it for her future children.
• Bought the paint for Keziah’s bed with a $10 off coupon – Wahoo!
• Taken last year’s potatoes out of the crawl space

To Be Accomplished

• Finish Keziah’s bed. Richard put it all together on Saturday, then took it apart again to fill the holes, sand it down one more time, prime it, paint it, then put it back together again. I am thinking this is going to take at least another week.
• Dejunk and clean Fisher’s room
• Move Keziah’s existing bed to Fisher’s room
• Clean sewing room and get it ready for school
• Clean school room
• Finish cleaning my bathroom/closet. This is almost done, but not quite.
• Hang up our maps and timelines for the year.
• Make cover sheets for my Math Alive: Eureka! students.
• Move the buckets of wheat that were behind my bed down to the crawl space.
• Clean out the bookshelf in the wood room, find room for all those books on other bookshelves, and put books on it for this year’s homeschool focus.
• Prepare my lecture on generational archetypes for The Hero Project class I am teaching at iFamily.
• Finish sorting Fisher’s and Anne’s too-small clothes and assess what things they need for the next year.
• Sleep
• Go grocery shopping.

That is my small list…not my everything I wish I could accomplish list, just my small list of things that really, really, really need to get done this week, some sooner than others. iFamily starts Wednesday, so I have to get those things done today or tomorrow at the latest. Fisher’s bed is now removed from his room, so I would like to get Keziah’s bed moved into Fisher’s room tonight when Richard gets home from work so we can start getting his room into some semblance of order. I guess Keziah can sleep with Blythe for a few days until her bed is finished.

Off to work on my bathroom some more.