The precious arrived this morning.

The very first thing we did was pull down the cabinets in the garage, revealing pristine pegboard behind them:

I was fully convinced that there was going to be a massive hole and perhaps a live possum behind those cabinets, so the fact that it ended up being more usable pegboard is a huge plus. We tossed the cabinets into the bin and then threw out a bunch of stuff from the garage and the back yard that has been sitting around for way too long, plus an ancient end table from inside the house that we’ll be replacing soon. Then we ordered a garage cabinet from Lowe’s that will be here tomorrow. Among the things we threw away: a roof rake that we inherited from my in-laws easily ten years ago if not longer that has never been out of the box it came in. My wife, who I love dearly, tried to keep it. We just had fourteen feet of snow and felt no need to rake the roof. We’re never using that Goddamn thing.

I have been told that she will very much enjoy the I Told You So moment if it comes next winter. Me, I’ll just buy a new fucking roof rake. (I won’t. This will never happen. I find the entire concept of roof rakes ridiculous.)

Then we tried to cut the post down again:

You may notice that it looks shorter than last time. The reason is I tried to cut it off at ground level using the same reciprocating saw and a new saw blade and it absolutely would not bite, so I tried again from higher up, taking off a foot and a half or so more, and it cut through clean just like it did last time. At this point what’s left is full of twigs and soil and, we’re pretty sure, at least one dead baby bird, and I’m pretty sure the bottom six inches or so is full of concrete, which is why my saw wouldn’t cut through it. I refuse to dig out whatever blob of concrete this thing got sunk into, so I threw a post up on Craigslist offering $100 for anyone who wants to come tear this thing out of my lawn and got six responses within ten minutes, so we have a guy coming over tomorrow to do that. If he flakes, we have five more in line, so somebody is going to do it. Just not me.

Then it was time for the bedroom. Which is much bigger than it looks in this picture, our bed is just huge. There’s also plenty of space behind me, which is where the bed used to be.

The order of operations:

1. Strip the bed.
2. Pull the made-of-fucking-neutronium mattress off the bed and lean it up against the wall somewhere. This was easily the hardest part of the job.
3. Lift the metal frame off from around the mattress and base, Tetris it across the room into its new location. Get the chair that was sitting in the corner being in the way out of the way.
4. Shove the adjustable base, also heavy as fuck, into its new location, lifting the frame up and out of the way to slide the base underneath it.
5. Wash and clean the floor. Wonder how we have been living in the immense amount of filth that was under our bed. Discover things that should not have been under there.
6. Tetris Thor’s Mattress back on top of the bed.
7. PIVOT!!!!!
8. Move the dresser from its old location (where the bookshelves are in this picture) to its new location to the right of where I’m standing while I’m taking the picture.
9. Take all the books off both bookshelves, move the bookshelves. Resolve to throw one of them away as soon as possible since it’s falling apart.
10. Look around for a bookshelf solution; Ikea is getting so much money from me in the near future, but nothing has been ordered just yet.
11. Order two new nightstands that are more functional than the ones we have; they’ll be here Wednesday.
12. Put most of the books back. Throw some away and put some in a box for Goodwill or whoever takes old books that nobody wants.
13. Clean the floor again a few more times.
14. Upon the wife’s declaration that we’re hiring someone to redo our closet (behind me) soon, tear the old doors off the closet and throw them into the dumpster.
15. Holy fucking Christ how do we live like this???? Vacuum the shit out of the floor— again— and the old tracks for the closet doors. The closet doors were almost never closed anyway, so seeing our clothes inside the closet isn’t that big of a deal.

Meanwhile, while I was tearing down closet doors:

See that wooden trellis, back against the fence? Bek tore that down. We still need to fix the fence. That’s on the list for tomorrow, along with starting work in the basement, possibly putting the rest of the shelving back on the wall in the bedroom, and watching as someone takes five minutes to tear that post out and still gets a hundred dollars of money from me because I don’t want to do it. Also, I have a dentist appointment, scheduled before I knew about all this shit.

Best Spring Break evar.