Cleaning up Daddy's house in June, 2004. The journaling, which is hidden behind the page is after the photos.
The hidden journaling reads:
Cleaning up Daddy’s house –
June, 2004
When you combine 2 depression era
packrats in a good-sized house for 35 years you get one heck of a mess to clean
up. In June of 2004 we gathered at Daddy’s house to try to get control of the
clutter. Lee took on the shed, and worked in the merciless heat. Among all the
old sets of dishes, scraps of lead for bullet making, old picture frames and
other half-completed projects for “some day” were skeletons of long dead
rats, about a billion live and dead ants and roaches, enough dust to start a new
garden, and all kinds of awful stuff and treasures. There were tools Daddy only
used a few times before he moved on to something else. The gem tumbler. The
ShopSmith. All his hobbies that were abandoned as soon as he got the bug to get
or do something else. And Mimi’s old china and pottery sets back to who knows
when. And Maebird’s nice china too, what was left of it. There was furniture
to be refinished and more.
Inside the house, Edward worked on
the gun “shrine” room, the one no one had used in over 15 years. There was
plenty of value in there for gun collectors, but it all had to be sorted and
weeded, so it was very slow going.
Kathleen took on the main
bathroom, stripping the walls and painting with Kilz. Barbara did the kitchen,
and I worked on the closets and dressers in Daddy’s bedroom and the guest
room. And did the lunch run!
Lee counted 50 bags of trash
before we were even done. Just a
couple of months later, Bartow was hit by 3 hurricanes, Charley, Frances and
Jeanne. Charley caused a lot of damage around town, but Daddy’s house was
unharmed. (Still stinky and unlivable, but unharmed by the hurricanes.) We were
all affected by the hurricanes and lost our momentum and motivation to get the
house ready for sale. We didn’t come back and work on it again until the
following year.
Some humorous bits:
Kathleen recalled Aunt Marion and
Aunt Pam did Nanny’s house, and she tried to imagine the two of them dancing
to the oldies in the living room as we did. Naaaah, probably not.
I had previously ripped down the
vinyl wall coverings in Daddy’s bathroom and revealed rather a lot of mold and
mildew damage. After scrubbing with bleach, Edward announced that one
configuration looked like a donkey. No, I thought it was two poodles, and the
second poodle was sniffing the other’s behind. I took pictures and put them up
on my website with the title “Mold and mildew art: Who knew it could be so
entertaining?”
And who can forget finding stashes
of coins everywhere? We came to fully understand that Daddy really did
have “buckets of money.”
