Unloading The Clutter

     I was having troubles juggling school work and house work and a lot of the time I just wanted to sit and do nothing. Things had been absolutely crazy around home. This "down sizing" is work.  But every thing we get rid of makes one less thing to move.  It feels good to get rid of sooo much crap, and makes this place look bigger.  But, not only is it a lot of work, it is very time consuming. We had gotten new living room carpet before                                                                                           Christmas, and
liked the new look so much, we
decided to get carpet in the family room. 
     The picture here is of Abbey inspecting the new living room carpet. 
      To get the family room ready for Joe to rip up the old carpet, I had to set up a temporary 20 gal tank, which I did in the living room.  Then all of the family room furniture and 55 gal fish tank were moved in front of the fire place and in to the dinning room. Once the new carpet was installed, I decided to take the 55 gal tank to school, so it doesn’t have to be moved any more until we are ready to settle in to the “house of our dreams” or what ever farm house comes with the “land of our dreams”. 
     Here is a picture of the 55 gal tank set up...before draining it.  Mr. T is the painted turtle seen at the left.  Aquariums and terrariums are referred to as "living art" that constantly changes.  It is my favorite type of "art" because I love watching animals.  But this is high maintenance art.

     We sold my office desk, which was a huge old courthouse desk. So, most of my desk stuff (books, files, office supplies, arts and craft junk) were still in boxes, in my office and in Daniels room.  I had thrown away some stuff, but needed to sort through the rest of it.  I moved from an 8 drawer desk down to a 2 drawer desk.  The smaller desk really made the office look more spacious though.  The roll top desk in the living room has quite a bit of space in it for stuff.  So I am still organizing.
     We are getting ready to put some stuff (including furniture) in a storage unit to also eliminate clutter. There is a lot of Courtney’s stuff that she will want once she moves, but does not need right now.  We are going through the house room by room and getting rid of unwanted and unneeded stuff, including excess furniture.  This place will look much larger and nicer with out all the clutter.  Some of it is hard to part with, cause it brings back fond memories....but it is just stuff....things we'll never use.....and never miss.  It is stuff the kids do not want.....and why should we clutter their lives with it any way?  And some of it is no longer usable with new technology.... Encyclopedias, VCR tapes, Game discs for old computer systems, tape recorders and boom boxes, old TVs, old monitors, even some CD’s. We are removing kids toys, old board games, old nick-nacks, old trophies, etc.  I have gotten rid of most the animal cages and am also scaling down on plants.  I could go on and on.
     After a six                          Kaysha trying to stay out of the way.
day weekend, it seemed like a pretty long four day week at school.  It is hard to stay focused and get motivated to do school work when I am so pre-occupied with “cleaning house”, although it is nice to come in here and sit down to work.  Use my brain instead of my body.  There are times when I am sooo over whelmed with the task at hand (either school work or house work) that I just putter around, not knowing where to start and not really getting anything done.

Green Acres Is The Place To Be

October 08 –
Joe and I saw a farm and horses for sale on our way to an October Fest party at Moraine View Park. On the way home we got their number....and thus started our pursuit for a farm.  It had been my life long dream to have my own horse. Joe and I both have enjoyed my twin sister Carol's farm in Indiana.  And with all three children in college, our thoughts of buying a smaller home and a place in the country, got us started looking for some property and getting our house ready to sell.

Here we all are, (Holly, Joe, Courtney, Daniel, Britney, and our dog Kaysha)
                          This photo was taken in 2005.  
                          

We started work on cleaning out closets, organizing our junk and getting the place ready to sell .  Five piles....pitch, sell, give away, store for kids to take later, and keep.  Our cat Abbey found all the new piles intriguing and some a good place to take a nap.
     



We looked at 4 places through out the fall. We made an offer on one of the places (A nice farm and house on US Route 150) that most appealed to us. I felt we were taking our chances by buying before selling, but believed our place would sell by summer, and our Realtor gave us hints on how to sell our place. But, someone beat us to the offer on the farm on US 150. We made a back up offer that was accepted, contingent on the other offer being rescinded, but that did not happen.
 
     Thinking about getting a horse made me realize it might be wise to get re-educated on all the in’s and out’s of horsemanship (if that’s a word).  So,
I had a series of 12 private lessons (during the winter) and 3 classes through Heartland Collage at Raspberry Grove Equestrian Center.  I needed to re-learn how to tack and properly ride a horse, to figure out how to take care of a horse and how to buy one. 

     Looking for places over the winter was fun....especially compared to working on our place.  However, when I saw something I kind of liked, I spent too much time contemplating how I would arrange furniture, fix up the house and barn, or put up fencing for horses. If the land was really nice,
the house was either too big, too small, or too run down.  Or if the house seemed ideal, the land was lacking a barn or fence or did not have enough acreage.  It seemed that the best places were also the most expensive ones.  Go Figure!  So the search continued.

     During the month of February, we went back and forth with offers and counter offers on a farm in Heyworth. Finally we accepted the sellers verbal counter offer.  It was higher than we wanted to go, so I was a little nervous and uncomfortable, but I was excited about it as well. Our Realtor came by our house at 11pm for us to draw up and sign the offer which he put in the other Realtors drop box early the next morning. Well, the buyer ended up accepting a higher offer that came in before he had signed ours, even though he had verbally agreed to ours first. So the search continued once again.  We just knew there was a Green Acres Is The Place For Us.  : -)