a small update

I've cleaned up the lemon tree for easier picking (see a "before" pic at the end of this post and a "WAY before" pic in this post) and H. has been spending his weekends building a retaining wall (our yard is a good foot and a half higher than our neighbor's); soon we'll have an extended drain pipe as well to keep the roof runoff from flooding over to the neighbor's yard and/or washing away all of H's hard work. I must remember to bake that man a cake to thank him for his troubles.

Upstairs in the master bedroom I've made a bit more progress. Here's the before (from December 2008, I really hadn't made too much of a dent until recently) :

And here's the after:


Ok, so it's still a mess, and tough to compare the two pictures, but there is definite progress. I dropped off another full trunkload at Goodwill last week (which included most of the large picture frames, 3 heavy antique stand mixers that I was unable to fix, some fabric scraps that I decided I'll never use, and several boxes of other miscellaneous stuff). I had not intended to put a boxspring/mattress back in yet (there goes that floor space I just cleared!), but I did intend to make this a functional bedroom again eventually, and perhaps more importantly, my sister needed to get some things out of her house. I figured she could use a bit of encouragement to keep cleaning (it's a Process, I keep telling her) and I hoped that having one bigger item whisked away would help.