Every Nook and Cranny

We've been dragging out every box, bag, and basket in our house, cleaning it out, and, possibly giving it away.  Or selling it--Jason has become a Craigslist fiend over the past month or so, getting rid of everything from a set of hockey pads to a filing cabinet to most of our bedroom furniture.

All this cleaning.  All this purging.  Possibly it is nesting season.  Certainly it has been (until recently) January, when cleaning and purging and organizing are top of the list.  Definitely we have to find room for another inhabitant at our house soon.  But mostly, it's The Project.  After a month of delay, today was (hopefully) D-Day in our upstairs.  That's Demolition Day, as construction begins on the dormer shed bump-out of our upstairs, creating closets, a bigger bathroom, and more living space in our house.  Yes, we are those crazy people trying to race the due-date clock with a construction project timeline.

Moving out of our upstairs means moving into our downstairs...which means moving out of our downstairs, too.  We have a clothes rack in the dining room, we've moved our light-blocking shades to the spare room, and our basement...well, our basement looks like we're preparing for a yard sale (possibly because there is a pile of stuff awaiting hits on Craigslist--anyone want a fire log holder?).

I don't do chaos very well, so this is a bit of a psychological challenge for me.  But it helps that we've dug up some fun treasures in the process.  Like the above "Growing List of Possible Jason-Missy Activities," penned very early in our dating relationship, which we totally lost track of and yet have still managed to check off most of the things over the past nine years.  Or the only-funny-to-us "quote wall" from Oxford I found in a box of pictures.  Or a series of emails between Jason and me (long deleted) written in the first few months of dating when he was stuck in Kenya for three weeks.  Or the fabulous mixed tape I put together in high school of all the best songs ever (Michael W. Smith?  Check.  Songs recorded off country radio?  Check.  Tinny sound and songs that are slightly faster than they are supposed to be?  Double check.). 

For now, I'm just living for that day when my whole self can fit in the bathtub, and I can actually put my laundry away in the closet.  It will be all worth it then, right?