I Got Old. Fast.

I had a self-imposed deadline of being out of the old house - completely - by the end of June. I thought I had a good plan for making that happen, but it's hard to quantify just how much time is required to move things in or out of a place when stairs are involved in every...single..trip.

2 weeks ago, I think (the days and weeks all kind of blend together with this virus-related work from home stuff, right?), I got enough stuff moved over to the new house that the dogs and I could live there. Maybe it was 3 weeks ago, I can't remember. 

Regardless, the big hurdles left to be fully moved out were:

• The basement wood shop
• The garage metal shop
• Cleaning, primarily the kitchen

The basement wood shop had been cobbled together over the course of 5-6 years, and rather than move all of it over to the new place, I spent a single weekend throwing most of the non-tools in a dumpster; workbenches, assembly tables, scrap lumber, shelving, it all went in a 13yd dumpster and there wasn't an inch of dumpster space to spare when it was all said and done. I had to cut some of the benches into pieces just to get them out of the house, but all of it, every single load I carried out to the dumpster, required either going up the basement steps, through the house, and down the front yard steps, or going out the basement walkout door, up some steps, and then all the way around the house. 

The garage wasn't a big issue to clean out, but man, metal dust is nasty stuff. And since it's borderline impossible to find a mask or respirator of any kind at the moment, I was stuck wearing my old respirator, and that thing's 12 different kinds of old and gross. I had some old oak logs in the garage I'd been hanging on to for some silly reason, and they were too heavy to move, so I had to cut them into pieces with a variety of tools definitely not meant for cutting tree trunks, and then I split them with my sorry excuse for an axe (know what else can't be found on the shelves at the moment? Axes. Somehow, the virus caused a run on axes...). That took way more time than I wanted it to.

The worst, by far, was the kitchen cleaning. Let's just leave it at this: I went through 4 bottles of Soft Scrub, and scrubbed every square inch of the floor by hand. And the dog hair...I wouldn't trade my dogs for anything in the world, but with Roscoe being a lab/chow/border collie/shepherd/cattle dog combo, it's shedded dog hair hell.   

Miserable work, but I got it done. 

Since then, not much progress has been made, partially by choice, partially due to circumstances beyond my control. I had to work last weekend, and I felt like the basement/garage/kitchen cleaning extravaganza took a little (lot) out of me, so a few days of laying low was in order. 

More importantly, and what the title of this post alluded to, I sustained a couple minor injuries during the cleaning fiasco. I sprained a knee, and may or may not have been gifted with an umbilical hernia. Good times.

The knee, that could have happened anytime, anywhere. The new place is kind of a catastrophe and with Freckles still being in the puppy phase of things where she likes to hang out in my feet 24/7, I have to take a lot of weird steps at times to avoid stepping her. Or, I could have come down a ladder wrong, or taken a funky step while carrying something into or out of a house. Could have been anything.

The hernia thing, the jury's still out on that, but if I did in fact get one, it's undoubtedly from me carrying some stupid heavy object out of or into a house. That's on me. Now I have to check my belly button 58 times a day to see if my insides are trying to become my outsides. 

All that said...in a few days things are gonna get cranked back up. I've got a 30yd dumpster coming and the finished basement, she's going back to her original state. I need to open that space up so I can see the MEP (mechanical, electric, plumbing) systems, and maybe more importantly, I need to get rid of the dead animals in the ceiling and dog-stained everything. Right now, every last one of my tools is on the main floor of the house, and they all need to go down to the basement. I've got lumber piled up in the back yard like a redneck, and there's just kind of a general logjam with that basement being unusable. 

1300 sq. ft., divided into about 4-5 different rooms...LOTS of drywall and insulation...it's all gotta go. Tearing it out over the course of a few days isn't so bad, but the logistics of getting it all to the dumpster, every single option is the absolute worst. But it's gotta be done, so I'm gonna do it.  

As long as the knee continues to get better and not worse, and as long as my belly button doesn't explode.