Pretty sure it's been at minimum a full year since my dining room table was completely cleared off. It's been several months since I even bothered to reduce the amount of crap piled on top of it. It was the repository for receipts and bills, caps and scarves, swag, trash, and an enormous amount of stuff that had no other home. I found acres of papers to be filed. There were broken CD cases. (Side note: I don't have a CD player in my house anymore. There's one in the car, that I haven't touched in a couple years.) There was a bath towel and PJ bottoms on a chair. There was a bag of clothes I want to give to the closest thrift store. And, as always, there were loose bits of hardware and bits of plastic that I have no idea whether they are worth keeping.
I started sorting, filing, tossing, recycling, and clearing in earnest about 11 this morning. I played at it a little before then, and the Mr had moved some things early before I got up. I had to take a few breaks, to buy a chuck roast and carrots for dinner (Side note 2: It's November 30th -- I always eat pot roast on November 30th, in honor of my grandmother, who used to make them so often for family dinners that I can't disassociate these things in my mind) and to rest so that my shoulder and spine weren't overused. With help, once the Mr came back home, we got the whole dining room cleared, swept, dusted, extended (table leaf), and set just a few minutes before our guests arrived at 7. And even then, the accordion folder and stand-up mail sorter I had been trying to sort and fill were just set on the floor by the piano, and a bunch of the junk from the dining room table got moved to the card table that is still temporarily set up in the living room. I really only shuffled junk around. To clean one table, I filled another. Tomorrow I will have to clear that table, and it's possible that I will move things to the side table in the kitchen to do it. And to clear the side table in the kitchen, where will that junk go? I have no freaking idea.
I have to keep this space open now. We needed a place where five adults could sit and play games, and we needed an overhead light (my living room only has lamps). It will be a constant battle to keep it clean, but there is a reward to keeping it useful. It will be a losing fight to keep the chairs vacuumed. We used the Furminator to scrape a thick layer of feline undercoat off of the upholstery, and then vacuumed, and within moments of moving cleaned chairs to the kitchen so we could finish sweeping the floor, Jackie and Athena were on them, replacing their lovingly applied undercoats. Harvey thought it was fun to distract me from cleaning the dining room by knocking plants down from the piano and off the front window shelf. By the time this is all over, I should have dealt with enough clutter that he might lose interest in jumping from the piano, through the pass-through wall, to the side table in the kitchen, because there won't be much to dump on the floor. But I doubt it. He will find something to knock over every single day. He won't stop until the house is completely empty, which it will never be. So every day, I'll keep picking things off the floor and then I'll do it all over again the day after that.
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