I've been dealing with fiddly little projects that I've put off a long time, and this is just talking to myself.
I'd been meaning to tidy up the furnace room when RDC said he wanted to get a tarp to lay on the decaying floor to protect all our gear from the From Beneath You It Devours. That struck me as too much like the former owner's bathmat that failed to serve as a doormat between the gritty furnace room and the finished basement. I suggested the leftover matting from recovering the porch floor. It is porous and therefore only a stopgap but supposedly we are going to get the basement done Real Soon Now. So I emptied the furnace room of gear--biking, kayaking, hiking, fly-fishing, diving, backpacking, snowshoeing, picnicking, and car-camping supplies for two--plus the large preservation box for my wedding dress, three copyboxes of whatever, a box of summer curtains, and a shopvac, tumbled the carpeting out of the garage rafters and spread it on the floor, and put everything back. I need to pound a lot of nails into the walls; suspending sleeping bags and packs has got to be better for them than heaping them in a corner.
Before family arrive on Saturday I have to do annoying cleaning like vacuuming the dead bugs out of the ceiling light fixtures and hanging the couch on the clothesline to give it a good thrashing. And oiling the wood furniture. And tidying my study so it converts to a guest room.
Cleaning my study means putting souvenirs in my scrapbook and sorting correspondence, which is not going to happen in time. It means clearing out the closet as much as possible. Or not: I could shove the contents of the laundry closet--suitcases, wetsuits, snowsuits, and waders--into the furnace room so guests could use that closet. Yes, that's better, because the study closet rail is only 20" long and four feet from the door--it's mounted perpendicular in a long narrow closet whose door is at the other end--and I'd have to clear only the one closet instead of both. But clearing the closet has meant I've already boxed and sorted many of the Yule presents I've accumulated throughout the year.
Clearing my desk is another issue. Garden plans, materials for letter campaigns, photographs, clippings for my sister, print articles not yet available online homeless because I officially don't keep non-personal paper, and stockings in various stages of completion. One thing I could take care of was a tangle of tarnished silver jewelry, so I polished that. That's not really cleaning up, but I don't want to box up unfinished projects.