A mom alone...

What does a mom do when she is left alone for 5 days?   I am sure visions of pedicures, hours at the mall and eating out with girlfriends float around in your mind.  That, however, is not my report.  Although there were a couple themed movie nights (Hugh Grant and Jane Austen) and, thanks to the serendipitous union of a laptop and Hulu+, the viewing of the new show Once Upon a Time, the days were filled with work, work, work!  After finishing the basement our home was in upheaval and it was up to me to put it all back together.  So I dug deep into my premommy life and miraculously recovered my super-efficient-focused-get-it-done-mode that I thought had been pulled out of me with the placenta of my first born.  Nothing was going to stop me from conquering!! (I know you will stop reading now and just look at the pictures and I am okay with that.  That is what I would do!!)

Let's start with the garage.  When we started the basement we had to move all of our basement life into the garage.  It was a whole lotta nothing: a jumbled collection of toys, underused workout equipment and heaps of old school papers to name of few categories.  Combined, it was a massive force of stuff that required too much of our time to purchase, slightly use and then toss in the basement to be forgotten forever.  Here is the very embarrassing picture of everything when the basement was empty:

All I wanted was to park a car in the garage again (even if it was the small car).  After two days of sorting and hualing and donating this is what was left:

And yes, the small car does fit!

So where did all that stuff go?  Let me show you!  First all of the Christmas decorations came down (on the day after Christmas, I felt like the Grinch) and all the holiday bins were sorted through.  Lots in the donation pile!!  Then the boys clothing:

I went through every single one of those bins!! Then they joined the food storage and "memory" bins down in the room we refer to as the "broken wall room" which is just a storage room in our basement.

Deep breathe...okay...on to the livingroom, kitchen and bathroom.  Now that there is no TV upstairs I reclaimed the livingroom as a quiet room.  My friend took our chair and a half (the one which was in mint condition that I found on the side of the road...e.g. "free".)  I rearranged it to look like this:

In the kitchen I cleaned out the entire fridge, scrubbed the oven and fixed the drawer that was missing it's front.  And in the bath I rearranged Jasper very creative interpretation of an "organized" bathroom drawer.  Zeke and the boy's drawer now look a lot better:

The last day was the hardest.  I so wanted to blow it all off and scrapbook all day.  I knew, however, that I would never have a whole day to focus on these household tasks (realizing that all these projects really just need focus to get them done).  I had built my scrapbook filing cubie-thingies during my Hugh Grant fest so those were ready for my over six foot span of paper.  

A quick nod here to my Kirkland Chicken Thigh box from Costco that I have loving stored my scrapbook paper in for the past 4 years.  You were wonderful in your time.  I so enjoyed how you held my paper.  You really were the perfect size.  Who knew that day at Costco when I needed you to haul all of my odd, obnoxiously large dairy and meat products that you would become such an integral part of my life.  I was very sad to see you go but you just didn't fit in my beautiful new basement.  (I know I have a picture of said box but can't find it in my ten-thousand plus pictures.) 

Then it was onto the dreaded back entry way closet.  How I loath this closet.  Stuff is always falling down off the shelf.  We can never find our shoes or, at least, both parts to the pair.  And our plastic grocery bags (that I always have the best of intention of bringing to Target to be recycled into those neat park benches) take over the floor and force everything else out so we have to hire a small skid loader to shove everything back in just to be able to close the door. Surprisingly, all the closet needed was one more storage container from Ikea and a good cleaning.  Here was the end result:

Whew!!  I know I did a lot more than this but just writing about it has made me tired.  As any stay at home mom can attest, it doesn't really matter WHAT you do with your time, if you can get even one day alone in your home, even if you just sit on the couch and stare at the wall, you will feel at least rejuvinated. A few hours, or days, into it, sadly enough, you will realize it doesn't matter how much time your are given...you will never get it all done!!