Dumpster Day

Remember a couple of months ago when we cleaned out our garage and it looked like this?

Well, here’s how it looked last weekend:

Somehow our gabage came back tenfold. And we accumulated a bunch of things that we’ve never owned before — a snow shovel, a wheelbarrow, a couple of Ariondack chairs that we need to store until spring.

That towering white thing in the middle? That’s our dishwasher stacked on top of our fugly old oven.

We like to utilize vertical storage space. There’s also a lawn mower, a weed whacker, another shovel — according to Bradley, one can never have too many shovels.

There’s an overabundance of recyclables because our town only collects recycling once a month. Annnnd they refuse to collect recycling if they think something isn’t sorted correctly. For the last 3 months, we’ve had a standoff with the recycling people because they think we don’t know the difference between glass beer bottles and aluminum cans. Currently the bane of our existence:

Aluminum bottles. Shaped like glass bottles. What is this world coming to?

They confuse the hell out of our recycling collection people. Because of those bottles, they’ve refused to pick up our recycling 3 months in a row. And we keep schlepping it back to the garage in hopes that they’ll figure it out. So far, no luck.

One the other side of the garage:

Piles of wood from past demolitions, an old ceiling fan, a moped and random cement supplies.

Our garage isn’t the only place we’ve been stashing garbage. We put a pile of wood from our dining room demolition under the hideous trellis in the back yard. Here’s Bradley digging them out from under a giant pile of leaves:

There is so much we hate about that trellis. It’s poorly built. It’s ugly. Its only purpose is to support the grape vine. That’s what all of those spidery branches are — they’re part of the grape vine that I was so geeked about when we first moved into the house. Fresh grapes! Stuffed grape leaves!

Turns out our grape vine doesn’t actually put out any grapes. And it’s the location of a ginormous ant hill. Most of the big branches are rotten and full of ants inside. Plus, it’s waaaaay too high-maintenance for us. Are you seeing that pile of leaves? Sorry neighbors. We’re way too busy sprucing up the inside of the house to rake leaves. The grape vine and its accompanying trellis had to go.

While Bradley sawed, I raked.

Jabba supervised:

She went to the vet earlier that day for her annual shots, and she had a horrible allergic reaction to them. Poor little peanut. We had to rush her back to the vet to get a shot of Benadryl. She spent the rest of the day wrapped up like a burrito where we could keep an eye on her.

Aside from a couple of trips to the vet, we spent the entire day loading our dumpster. We booked it for 2 weeks, but it took us one day to fill it up:

Here’s how the garage looks now:

Still a little messy, but at least it’s a contained mess. Most of which, by the way, is the recycling that just won’t go away.

The back of the house looks way less scary with the trellis gone:

We don’t miss the grape vine either:

We’re chomping at the bit to start renovating this part of the house. Right now it makes our house feel like a shanty. It’s an ugly tumor on the otherwise quaint old brick.

The window on the left is to the half-bath. The windows & door on the right are to the laundry room. We’re not really sure what’s going on with the mix-and-match siding:

And the contrasting stairs:

Either way, we won’t get too used to it. We plan on gut renovating those two rooms inside and out. New siding, new windows, and all. We’re counting down days until our self-imposed spending freeze is up. Then we’ll order supplies and get down to business.

We’ve been super busy at our casa — so busy that we’re really, really behind on posts. We’ll be back every day this week with updates. Promise. Stay tuned!

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