built on the ruins of a cardboard box one

[mrissa]

Today lydy came over to help me clean the basement. She did the stuff I couldn't do with the vertigo, and she did a fair amount of the stuff I could do but would have taken immensely longer to do, or else could do but would find my head spinning for days after. And the bits that I probably shouldn't have pushed were certainly all my fault and not Lydy's.

Still! Basement is clean! My head is weird and I feel very funny about the whole thing, but the basement is no longer a source of mental grimness. I hadn't been down there since the vertigo got bad, more or less, so it had sort of grown in my head until it was something like the underground bits of Paris, except instead of Renaissance skulls it would have things of immense personal significance, jumbled together in water-damaged boxes with dead bugs and all manner of unpleasantness. In reality it was a great deal more straightforward, and while we have a big trip to the charity people ahead of us (or a big visit from them, not sure which), and while there are more boxes to break down for the recycling than you would believe (oh seriously, the boxes), it is now a basement and not a pit of woe. And in fact it is a basement the furnace people can work in on Thursday without me fearing they're going to accidentally set the new furnace down on my grandfather's compass set or my glass Aslan or my old copy of Peter Duck. Or even a saxophone catalog from 1997 or a Gene Autry songbook.

One of the purposes of sitting in the library with the dog and a book nearly every morning is that it is good fun and the dog likes it. (This is the opposite of "a waste of your time and annoys the pig.") But another is that we are periodically reading books and adding the new ones we've just read to the shelves, and I like just sitting there getting the feel of my books around me, so that I know how the whole of it goes. And I feel like it's going to be impossible to do anything like that with the basement for awhile, because there are so many steps to go before it's done: the plumbing and the electrical and the, y'know, walls and stuff. But once we get there I think it will be immensely satisfying to have gotten there.

My friends have learned not to believe me when I say my house is a mess, and in turn I have learned not to apologize for the mess that is my house because it really isn't very messy, all things considered, and they will become intimidated and refuse to invite me over. But trust me when I say that this basement was orders and orders of magnitude messier than I am comfortable with in the rest of the house, and I am so happy that it has been brought back into the fold.

Comments

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

A clean basement is a fine and worthy thing (especially if it keeps the furnace folks from crushing stuff). Kudos to lydy for helping out.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

She is the best Lydy.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

But trust me when I say that this basement was orders and orders of magnitude messier than I am comfortable with in the rest of the house

And, translated into reality, this means that it was by far the least cluttered and disorganized unfinished basement I've ever been in.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And now I do not want to go into any other unfinished basement you've been in.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I think I'd be comfortable with a messy and dusty basement as long as it was classified as "storage space" and not "room" in my head.

On the other hand I also think my parents are nuts for *not* having ever turned the basement in their small house into a room, after 42+ years of living in that house. If it were me the lure of turning the half bath (there's only one bathroom in the house, otherwise) into something that's not actively unpleasant to use would have been ample motivation. I guess we all have our priorities. (Do the mention of plumbing, electrical and walls mean you're making a room for living in out of yours, or just a nicer basement?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We are making several rooms for living in. Timprov aspires to become the Thing In The Basement, and Mark and I fully support this aspiration and the other rooms it comes with.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Any kind of clutter is anathema to me, so I'm sympathetic. I'm very pleased for you. It sounds like an exhausting process, as sorting through large spaces filled with interesting things always is.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You have a glass Aslan? That is awesome.

If anyone set a furnace down on my old copy of Peter Duck I think the ensuing explosion would be visible to your part of the country.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Then you see why it's important that we got the basement cleaning done when we did!

My daddy and I were shopping on Christmas Eve, and I saw it in a rack of Christmas ornaments and gasped, "A glass Aslan!" sounding for all the world as though I was 7 years old. (I was a great deal more like 27.) And he grinned and bought it for me even though we were officially supposed to be shopping for other people and not each other. It is not a very spendy glass Aslan, and I don't know how many more Christmases it will last. But it was the very perfect thing from my daddy that Christmas.

Being us, we also checked the rack of ornaments in case they had a glass Reep or a really proper glass Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. They did not.

[redbird]

When I tell people "don't worry" when they warn me that they haven't cleaned before I visit, that doesn't mean "your home isn't messy," it means "I have a high tolerance for mess, so it won't bother me." Nor does it mean "I have a high tolerance for mess in my space, so you shouldn't mind it in yours."

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

And sometimes other people's mess is reassuring just because it looks different.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't have a high tolerance for mess--in my own house. Because then it's my mess or at least mess in my space, and therefore it's my problem. At other people's houses, eh, not my problem! Up to a certain point, of course, but you can get pretty messy before it's actually a problem for the guests practically.

[laurel]

Oh, that's excellent. Go Lydy! Go you!

I have pretty much constant low-level stress over not knowing where some of my precious things are and what condition they're in. The maddening part is during my move to South Dakota and back, I put especially important things in a box marked "PRECIOUS CARGO" so I wouldn't lose it . . . and now I can't find it. It made it to SoDak and I'm sure it made it back here, but have been unable to locate it in the mess of boxes and whatnot in the garage, basement, and so on. Argh. And so every time there's a little water in the basement or a sign of rodents in the garage or something, I fret.

So. Anyway. My way of saying I totally understand wanting to know where stuff is, especially so furnace guys don't put stuff on it and so forth.