A Good Weekend

This weekend I stayed home, buckled down and accomplished quite a lot. I'm feeling pretty good about myself this morning, actually.

I spent some time hanging out with my sister, something I don't do enough of even though we live together. We walked up to our city's Farmer's Market Saturday morning and I even walked around an art fair. And I only spent $4 on a coffee with her.

By noon, I was home and dived into fixing up my bedroom. Which was in desperate need of organization and cleaning!!

Backing up just a bit, my sister and I used to live together in a rented house near our parents after we both finished grad school. This place was nice, but expensive for me and I had yet to face facts about my poor financial decisions. After that house, we split up and got our own places to rent. Even a bigger mistake as I started to hit rock bottom financially due to the higher rent! Thankfully, my boyfriend ended up living with me for three of those six months as he looked to buy his own house (he's a money smarty) so that helped a bit. And I finally started realizing I needed to dig out, cut back on everything (no cable!) and thankfully subleased my apartment right away in January (just five months into my lease). I put almost all of my stuff into my family's storage unit and then my sister let me move into her extra bedroom.

Her apartment is really small, but two bedrooms. I have my bed, a full closet, a dresser and a ton of boxes of stuff I thought I wanted to keep handy. And that's about it. Since I moved in, I hadn't really bothered to take the time to organize much other than booost up my bed (about 2.5 feet off the ground) to store all my boxes underneath. All in all, I used it to just sleep and store stuff. And it was on the brink of being declared a disaster area. Oh and I also keep my cat's litter box and food/water in there, so it's not in my sister's way and her little dog doesn't eat my cat's food. Naturally, my cat and I are very crowded, plus we don't like being messy. So time to organize!!

So Saturday, I moved out everything but the bed and dresser (minus just closing the closet door). I swept, vacuumed and mopped the hardwood floors, cleaned the window, swept out any little cobwebs and worked my butt off to make it shine. Then I moved my bed out of the corner and into a better location that allows me to walk around it better and see the window better. My mattress, boxspring and metal frame are pretty heavy and also measure out to an extra-long full size (courtesy of a 6-4 ex-boyfriend who swapped up to a queen). I then put my bed up on those floor cones to boost it, plus I boost it again with milkcrates and flat pieces of wood my father and sawed to fit the crates. This allows me to fit nearly all of my storage boxes underneath it with clearance.

I moved it all around by myself ... thank god, I'm not a weakling. :)

I set up my dresser on the opposite corner and a tall shelf/nightstand near my bed for reading and the things I use often, like make-up, books, important mail. I don't have a desk anymore, but I have a laptop, so my bed and nightstand are now pulling double-duty as my office zone.

After putting everything away and keeping things which still need sorting through out in the open in my view, I cleaned up the floors again, organized my laundry loads to take to our laundromat (I miss our own washer/dryer!!) and still had enough energy to scrub our bathroom floor on my hands/knees, vacuum up our little hallway, our living room and part of our kitchen, then wash all of our dishes in the kitchen and make us dinner. WHEW!!

After nine hours of cleaning, then dinner, I was both filthy and exhausted. My boyfriend came home from the tournament and I stayed at his house.

Sunday, we relaxed with my sister in the morning, then visited my father and fixed the vegetable garden in my boyfriend's backyard that we dug up and planted. We had to build our "snap pea prison" even taller and then stake our green peppers. After that, a trip to the grocery store (my favorite less expensive one!) and then I finally made it to the laundromat where I spent nearly 2.5 hours washing clothes, sheets and blankets.

I got home, happy in my near exhaustion again (isn't clean laundry wonderful?) and then somehow still had energy to organize my dresser for a lot of my clothes, organize our hall closet to fit all of my sister and my towels, sheets, extra blankets and bathroom stuff, then even cleaned out two boxes of bathroom stuff from when I moved, plus my backpack for work before finally going to sleep.

It was so nice to wake up this morning to a clean bedroom, knowing that I had my work clothes where I needed them and my lunch all set.

Most importantly, it was nice knowing that instead of putting this stuff off like I would normally do for the weekend and having a crappy Monday, I was ready to roll this morning.

I get paid this week, one of my salary adjustments is fully kicked in, and I'm ready to jump into sorting/organizing the rest of my paperwork and financials this week too.