It's been a busy around the house weekend this weekend. I spent 5 hours on Saturday cleaning and organizing the storage room. Now that we haven't seen a mouse in our house since Mousehunter Jim was here, I went down there with my vacuum, Clorox and a couple garbage bags to clean out the areas. Mice climb and can fit through any area that is smaller than a quarter of an inch. So, I did some mouse hunting myself -- only it was to make sure there wasn't a piece of mouse poop or the sight of mouse pee anywhere. This gets difficult, as the storage room is also home to MacTroll's network. Lots of cables to wipe down.
Most of our items in the basement were already in plastic containers. Plastic containers will keep lazy mice out. They can chew through the plastic if they really want what's on the inside. Metal is the best, but it's expensive. I purchased some containers of varying sizes and rearranged what was down in the basement. Now everything, except one box of cords is put away. I also realized that since we moved all the holiday stuff from the garage to the basement, we were going to need another set of metal shelves from Target. So I ran out and picked those up today.
I have an annoyance in my house. There was currently no good place to put shoes. We have hooks in the laundry room where we hang our most frequently used coats and our snowpants in the winter. But shoes end up on the floor of the utility closet in a big mess. And I have to admit that at one point, a cat peed on my shoes there, so I'm paranoid about leaving them on the floor. MacTroll, on the other hand, can't seem to remember to take his shoes off, and then always seemed bewildered that the floors got so dirty or the walkway from the kitchen to his office that used to have carpeting (and was high traffic anyway) was a different color than the rest of the carpet. I kept explaining it to him, but he refuses to believe he's that dirty. Sigh.
Anyway, while I was at Target picking up the metal racks, I found that they had a tall set of shelves that could be used as a shoe rack that would fit in the space in the utility closet and still leave plenty of space to store our vacuum. I was excited because it was also on clearance for like $20. I bought it and X-man helped me put it together tonight. He put all the plastic covers on the screw heads and then I started the nails into the cheap particle board backing and he got his toolbox hammer and finished nailing them in. Then he helped push the shelf support brackets into the right holes and collected all the shoes to put in the right places once I got it set up in the closet.
MacTroll poo pooed me for my organization. But if I prevent cat peeing and get rid of the heap of shoes, I kind of feel better about our house. It feels more home-like. So how can that be a bad thing? I mean, homey-ness for $20?
In other news, I replaced one of the cats' litterboxes this week. But before I put it down, I picked them all up off the floor, vacuumed the laundry room area where the boxes reside, and then got down on my hands and knees with a sponge, warm water and some Method floor cleaner and wiped up the whole laundry room. When it was dry, I put the clean/scooped boxes down with fresh litter in them and felt good about that, too.
I also broke down this week and ordered a carpet and a light box table for my Loosey room in the basement. I wanted a furry shaggy rug that was soft to sit or lie on. Something that makes your feet happy. Most of them in a 5'x8' were really expensive. I found one for half of what the others were costing online and decided I'd take a chance with it. Plus, it came in a platinum gray versus others that were either natural or beige or white, which kid of scare me for different reasons. It's on back order until April, however. The light box was on sale at Pottery Barn Teen, which is my Pottery Barn catalog of choice. Now I just need CB2 to put some of their yellow tables on sale, and I'll be in business... well, that is if I can settle on what I want to sit on in my room besides a fuzzy carpet. I found a couch at Carter's, but I kind of want something that can double as a guest bed. We're headed to Ikea in a few weeks, so I printed a wish list to check out what they have.
I just tucked my child into bed with his Tag reader at 9 p.m. He's been reading and playing games with that pretty much 4 nights a week at bed time since Christmas. He's excited because I found the Ben 10 book in a post Christmas sale. He didn't get out of his pajamas all day today.
Tomorrow, I get to start back in my Body Bar class (it was on break over the holidays). I've got a list of fitness/nutrition books I'd like to get from the library, but three of the five aren't even available throughout the entire Lincoln Trails Library System. They appear to have two of them in Palatine, so we'll see if the Tolono library can set me up to get their copies.
I hope everyone has a happy new year.
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