Adventures in the Fiery Furnace

Woohooo! I’m so excited to have made little dent in  The List!

I shall call it The Great Eave Purging Adventure. 

Work is so much more fun when you give it a name.

Try it some time.

That's tip #1

One of the reasons that we loved our house on sight was the variety of nooks, crannies, closets, and other Innie Paradise options. Two of my favorite ones are the cubby holes with little elf doors off of our bedroom. Among other things, these eaves are home to old shoes, shoe boxes, and baskets which had found a home on The List.

Now, that eave clutter was placed on The List  in January.  It was an easy fix… an afternoon purge party… a free make over…a motivational starter. And the perfect time to have completed this task would have been during the winter season, no? After all, those eaves are under a roofline beneath a piney stick forest in southeast Georgia.

It’s hot in there.

So hot, in fact, that I had to solve the problem of radiant heat in the master bedroom by tacking pieces of insulation to back of the doors.

It may not be pretty, but it works.

That’s tip #2 .

Yet there they sat, right through the long winter of 2010… right through the temperate southern springtime… right through the unseasonably cool month of May…

All the way to the southeast Georgia June.

A good time, I decided, to tackle the fiery furnace.

So I opened the oven.

It felt kind of like stepping on the scale.

Good grief.

First, I tossed out all of the boxes.

What a mess. I felt the need to inspect each box for buried treasure.

I just found more boxes.

I played that little game of “I’m going to need these” for about ten minutes before the heat got to me and I just started bagging. I took 5 bags and 47 boxes to the recycling center that day. If I find the need for a shoe box, I’ll just buy a pair of shoes.

I tossed shoes as well. For some oddball reason, I had saved a large box of the girls’ old shoes in there too. I think, in my defense, that I intended to give them away but had not found a recipient.

Ebenezer was loaded again, this time with items for Good Will. Along with the shoes and some other items which will remain unyakked, I bagged baskets from the other side of Innie Paradise.

This wasn’t so easy. My baskets are sort of a Debbie Land retrospective.

I had stiffy bow baskets from that phase and crafty baskets from that one. I had repurposed peach baskets from my peach phase and heart shaped ones from the trim-it-with-lace era.

I sorted out the ones that I thought useful or beautiful.

I sent the rest to Good Will…

...where they wait for some clever blogger to showcase as her Thifty Find  of the Week… right before she transforms them into matching wicker plate charges for eight and a stunning summer tablescape.

I just know it...

But I’ll risk purger’s remorse and delight in my recovered spaces. Now, I can actually reach the shelves with goodies which won’t fit in any other place in the house. You see, behind the stash, those eaves were actually organized.

I can scour through my totes full of fabric orphans and tackle THAT item on The List.  In fact, I’ve made a good dent already.

I can detour down memory lane if I want to. Yep. Did that too.

I can retrieve my luggage and tote bags and space bags...

I can use the baskets that I did save.

Maybe I'll  make a new cover for my old picnic basket.

Maybe, I'll  plan a picnic.

I'll call it The Great Picnic Basket Adventure.