I'm Exhausted!

It has now been a week since our landlord announced that he wants to sell the house we are renting. If you recall from this post, we asked him for a week to get the house in order, before he would bring people to see it.

Since the middle of December, we've been working on the Gifts for Gracias Christmas project, and this work has just taken over the house this year! Last year (Christmas of 2006), we had enough space out on the carport so that most of the mess stayed out there, but this year we had a lot of the Kids Against Hunger food boxes stored out there, so we had to use space in our big main room for sorting donations and creating gifts.

You may recall these pictures, posted back in early January, showing the condition of my living room, front porch, and carport:



Although many gifts had been distributed since those pictures were taken, we had also received another shipment of donations (half of a 40' container). . . so things looked pretty much like those pictures last week, when we got the call from the landlord.

We've been scrambling to sort, organize, and distribute donations for a week, and finally today I can say that we have reclaimed the house. The carport still has lots of boxes on it, but it now resembles an organized work space, instead of a disaster scene. The front porch is all cleaned off, and the public rooms of the house are cleared of all evidence of this project.

We still have to do a bit of work on the bedrooms, tool storage room, etc, but that is just normal organizing and cleaning stuff, not a massive operation like what we've just completed. We expect (hope) to have everything looking ready for visitors by noon tomorrow.

We're all exhausted, but it is really nice to have my house back again!