New Place: Work Begins

We both had Sunday and Monday off last weekend, so we headed over to the new homestead to start the cleaning up process and to find anything that we will need to get fixed before we move in. But just to give you an idea of what we had to deal with, here are the pictures from our "first look" at the place:

Obviously not move-in ready. In fact, it looked like it had been abandoned. We found out later basically that's what happened. Some stuff was cleaned out, but it was a long way from everything. Later when we started opening up the drawers, closets and cupboards we found more of the same. On our first pass, we filled 20+ of the large, 30-gallon trash bags with the stuff that we couldn't imagine anyone having a use for; Wendy's salad containers, dozens of coffee mugs, butter containers (some with mystery contents), unlabeled spray bottles with odd-smelling liquids in them, dozens of glasses with no two alike, every Christmas dodad ever sold at the Dollar Store and enough fake flowers to fill the fake flower section of a large craft store. The previous owner had a thing for toothpicks, which we would find in every room, in every closet, on every shelf, in every drawer. Toothpicks. Big Paul-Bunyan-sized toothpicks. We'd no sooner think that we'd found them all and one would fall out of a curtain or one would turn up hidden in some crevice. There is so much glitter from all the Christmas decorations embedded in everything that we're not sure we'll ever be completely rid of it. We still have all the big pieces of furniture to deal with; queen sleeper, love seat sleeper, two kitchen tables with two sets of chairs, recliner, swivel rocker, queen bed. (We're thinking a big donation to Restore; they'll come haul it all away for free.) The stuff in the last photo is some of what we thought we might get some nickles for at the next park-wide yard sale, so we're hanging on to that for now. Unless it accidentally falls into a trash bag.

The outside looked like this:

Piles of leaves everywhere, a dying lime tree, another large, overgrown dying lime tree, a couple volunteer bushes from the other side of the fence, one of which was disassembling the fence with its roots. And all sorts of odd bits around the yard; part of a fountain, part of a bird bath, in-ground sprinklers that don't seem to be hooked up to plumbing, a plastic tarp anchored to the ground with 6" Ardox nails, a bucket of dirt. After several more bags for the dumpster and 30 bags for the compost pile, here's what the yard looks like:

Clean slate. We don't know what we're going to do with it yet, but at least the obstructions are mostly out of the way.

We'll take some after photos of the interior once we get rid of the big furniture. I'm calling Restore on Monday to see what days they can do pick-ups. If the stars align, we may have a mostly-empty place to start moving our stuff into sometime next weekend.

Later.