Ahhh ... long weekend.

And I'm not doing anything today. I was extremely productive this weekend. Saturday I went to my brother's over in PA to help him clean the house. I'd asked him a couple weeks ago if there was anything I could do, and this was the one thing he came up with - they'd had a really hard time keeping up with the house since my sister-in-law passed away, and things were just getting a bit out of hand. I have news for him: his 'out of hand' is about 7 times cleaner than my house on a good day.

Regardless, I went down there and cleaned: swept and mopped the kitchen and dining room, dusted and vaccuumed the living room, vaccuumed the hallway and two bedrooms, and cleaned a bathroom. Not a bad afternoon's work, and the nice thing was, it was so productive - it was very much 'light cleaning,' where you could actually see the results of your effort (unlike this place, where even major effort yields little in tangible results). The place was looking much better, and my brother was feeling much better about it, when I left.

Then yesterday we poured some work into this place, finally cleaning up all the mess that had accumulated alongside the driveway. We took an entire pickup truck load of garbage to the dumpster where I work (which I'd previously gotten permission to do). We have another load of garbage ready to go to the dumpster, but couldn't take it yesterday - the dumpster was too full.

So now the garage is trashed, yes ... but at least the side of the driveway is finally cleaned out!! That's been bugging me for a year or more. Every time I'd pull in the driveway I'd just cringe. All I have to do now is try to get some grass to grow back into the bare areas where the stuff had been sitting ... or maybe just cover it with patio bricks or something to sit the garbage can on ... and that's one small area done! Small, but - completely done!

The garage will probably be a project for next weekend. I decided after working both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, I'm taking today off. Not doing nothin'. Relaxing and chilling, that's it. But the garage does need done, desperately (we've been using it for storage since spring, but I will get my truck back in there before bad weather).

After seeing into the nooks and crannies of someone else's house, and how clean and nice a place can be, with minmial effort to get it spruced back up like we did Saturday, I'm really ramped up to start putting this place back together after it's years of neglect. It will be a long, slow process, but that's no reason not to do it at all. I think what I need to do is focus on one area at a time, and while the weather holds it'll be the outside areas. But once the fall chill comes in for good, I'm going to start focusing on the kitchen. Again.

Hopefully I can maintain my motivation.