House House House.

Okay Okay Okay, so we took a huge leap and took on a fixer upper.  Well, half a fixer upper, I'm referring to the basement apartment in which Mona has used like an abandoned storage unit for 10 or more years

It was like running through hip-deep mud trying to close with Mona.  In the end, she got her "30 days" after closing to "move out", which she claimed she wasn't going to need.  Well, when she finally came around with a trailer full of her mother's old  things (her mother died a couple weeks after she closed, so she came up to IA from TX, signed our paperwork, went to WI for her mother's funeral and to take some of her belongings, then came back with an already filled trailer), and took a week downstairs  to "clean up" and "pack".  

 I was very relieved that we were on good terms when she got here, but we seriously wanted her to get a move on and maybe, I don't know, get help! She's a 70ish year old woman who must do everything herself and pay little or nothing for things I'd deem necessary in life. And I am cheap, too, just saying. So this is what the house looked like the afternoon after she left. 

So. Much. Crap.


Where to start, you ask? Overwhelming for this pregnant, puking, stay-at-home mother of two.  But I started by filling 13-gallon-sized garbage bags of mostly disposable items she seemed to have a fondness for collecting.  That evening I filled 5 of them and still barely made a dent.  It was rough.

Luckily we have a big dumpster behind our backyard--that belongs to our neighboring apartment complex, with no complaints to our using it so far.  Our plan was to have a garage sale ASAP, but Brian had to go out of town that weekend for his good friend David's wedding. So, we pushed it back to the first cold week in November- Iowa was strangely blessed with a record warm November. Bummer.  But heck we made about 125 bucks total out of some Mona stuff, so that's successful enough for me.

We had this stuff out on our lawn for about two weeks, giving it away here and there, in fact, Brian and I pick up that huge entertainment center and carried it to the house with the green door pictured below. It was a good workout, and so glad that my friend could use it.

I had no idea this was a sewing machine. She was using it as a microwave stand.  Classy. Sold it for $20.

Haha, we totally sent this to Scarlett's cousin for Christmas. I hope he liked it, I hope it works!

Brian had to destroy this heavy duty Mona-constructed closet in the corner in the room to get it out.  It was a huge pain, but I'm so glad its gone, it took up a ton of room!


One morning a week and a half later, I was bewildered to find all of the stuff gone from our front lawn.  When I woke up, Brian told me to look outside and I thought someone had come and stolen it--which would've been totally great.  Brian couldn't get back to sleep at 3 am that morning, so he decided to pack it into our CR-V and took a couple trips to the dumpster-all before 7 AM! It cost like $12 total. So much work, but at least it wasn't expensive!