What do you do with an extra week or vacation and no burning desire to go anywhere? Clean, of course! Ok, ok, I know that's not everyone's answer, but that's what we decided to do. We have a 10'x10' storage unit that we've been saying for a while needs to be gone through, and over the winter, things had sort of piled up around the house, so we blocked off a random week to deal with it.
For once, I remembered to take before shots of the mess to be tackled, and it looks like a pretty typical storage unit, full of just stuff.
We packed for a full day excursion, and arrived Monday morning at 10am, set up a table, and started pulling stuff out. That weird thing in the middle that's wrapped in plastic is a weaving loom my mother got me quite a few years ago. It is absolutely my retirement/"when I have time and room" plan, but I'm not ready for it just yet, and we can't stack anything on top of it.
But what we can do is put shelving over it! We carefully measured the area it needed, and bought exactly the number of shelves needed to cover it, then found out we were wrong (in a good way). It's hard to see, but there is a handle sticking out from the end of the loom, so we put the "extra" shelf sideways in front of it for protection, and then loaded up the space above it.
Conveniently, Angel's company had moved offices last year, and he'd snagged another shelving unit from them that very conveniently fit a bunch of smaller, slightly precarious boxes.
We pulled out and consolidated the back left corner of the unit, but by then, we'd been there for about 6 hours and were getting tired, so we just shoved everything in willy-nilly and called it a day.
The next day we were a bit sore after all that, so we headed up to a fabric warehouse in Amish country, PA. A friend's mother introduced me to the place long ago, and I try to go up about once a year. You're not guaranteed to find anything specific there, but it's a fascinating place to rummage through, and with Joann's going out of business, probably the closest non-specialty fabric store. Bit of a drive, tho.
We got lucky and Tuesday was absolutely lovely. Cool, mix of clouds and sun, and almost no traffic. The drive out via York is a lot of two-lane divided highways with nothing but trees and fields (except for York itself), and we just rolled the windows down and chatted the whole way. The place itself looks like a single-story warehouse (for good reasons), but once you get inside and past the initial all-things-quilting room, it's literally just stacks of fabric bolts in a vague semblance of order.
Angel was gracious enough to be patient as I touched almost every bolt in there, and even helped point out some that I'd glossed past, or suggested uses I hadn't thought of. I did not find everything I went there for, but I did find a lot, and walked out of there with multiple complete bolts (hello, unbleached muslin practice fabric and jeans denim) and yardage cuts (new work shirts!).
The last time we were up there, we'd stopped for lunch at a place Angel loves called California Tortilla. It had been long enough that the place in York had closed, but there was one to the east, if we headed toward 95 to return home. Even better, in searching for other locations, we found out one had opened up about 10 miles from our house, so hopefully we can go more often! The food was delicious, and the drive back surprisingly uneventful, for a Tuesday at 5pm.
Wednesday was back to the storage unit, and we were able to finish it off in "only" a couple more hours. Pulled out a lot of trash/ obsolete electronics/ "we can just sell this" stuff, and while there's more in there, for sure, we'd definitely hit our limit. We fitted everything in nicely, loaded up the cars, and called it done.
I'm taking a Japanese class right now through a local community college, just for funsies, and out of an abundance of caution, I decided to check the assignments for the week after finishing up at the storage unit. I had thought that we had a final presentation and the last chapter of homework due the following week on Thursday, but apparently I was very wrong, and it was due this Thursday. As in, "tomorrow." So the rest of Wednesday and pretty much the whole day Thursday was spent frantically trying to remember and learn enough vocabulary to make and record a presentation and finish 8 pages of textbook exercises. I did get it done and submitted, but it was 7:30pm-ish before I could rest easily. Not how I'd intended to spend a day of vacation, but at least I could hammer it out and not be stuck worrying about it while sitting at work.
Friday was spent mostly deep cleaning the bathrooms/kitchen (which desperately needed it), posting things for sale, moving things around, and prepping things for a donations run. On a whim, I tracked how many times I went up and down the stairs, and by 2pm, I'd racked up 18 flights. Which might not seem like a lot, but that's when Angel and I both ran out of steam and decided the house was good enough, we were done. Are there still bolts of fabric on the loveseat? Yes. Do certain plants still need to be repotted? Absolutely. Can it all wait, because we've definitely accomplished enough for one week? 6,000%. It might not be everyone's dream vacation, but we got a lot done, had fun together, and still have a weekend to recover before returning to work Monday. Not a bad life.
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