As promised, a post on Sunday

The Wizard and I just got back from a weekend away from Dodge, so there is really nothing new that has happened in terms of de-crapifying. However, over the summer while I was recovering from breaking ribs and tearing knee ligaments as well as helping Media Guy and Future Vet get ready to move out and the Drama Queen ready to move back in, we worked on the Old Shed. Which should never be confused with the New Shed.

This is the Old Shed. The door is cracked a bit and sometime in the past someone apparently experimented on it with paint. The New Shed is just to the right of the Old Shed, but more on that at a later date.

As can be expected when doing any kind of de-crapification around here, the Old Shed was filled with an interesting array of STUFF, including lots of cardboard boxes, which we collapsed and stuffed into other boxes so that we could carry them all off to recycling:

 Don't ask why we don't just do that as we empty the boxes in the first place. I don't KNOW!!

We also took out our bicycles, which were buried under the boxes and other STUFF. Burial by box makes bicycles bothersome to bike on. (Say that five times fast!)

We found the carcasses of two of my Grandmother's green chairs, and therein lies a tale:

My great-grandmother, Eugenia Key Cagle, started housekeeping with these chairs sometime before 1899, which was the year that her oldest daughter, my Grandmother, was born. Many years later, when my great-grandmother was moving in with her youngest daughter (my Aunt Kat) for the last few years of her life, she was concerned about her chairs. My great-aunt already had a houseful of furniture and didn't need (or want) the chairs, but my great-grandmother was very attached to the chairs and didn't want them given away.

So my grandmother promised her mother that she would take the chairs when she moved back to Little Rock. In the meantime, the chairs were stored in Aunt Kat's attic. In the fullness of time, Grandmother moved back to Little Rock, got her mother's chairs out of the attic, refurbished them, painted them green, and put new seats on them. For many more years, these were my Grandmother's dining room and incidental chairs. When my Grandmother moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1980, the chairs went with her.

Many more years passed. When my Grandmother was 103, she moved into an assisted-living facility and simply did not have room for more than two of her mother's chairs. She fretted about them for days, until I promised to take the rest of the chairs. Even though I had no possible use for them. And they were very rickety, being by this time over 100 years old.

When my Grandmother died, the day before her 106th birthday, the remaining two chairs came to my house as well. Some had fallen apart by then. (See above.) But they are all in my house (or garage or shed) until I can either pass them along, or find the courage to toss them out. I have already promised the Drama Queen that she does not have to take the chairs when I am gone.

There was also a lot of potentially useful and/or interesting STUFF in the Old Shed:

Not all of it was useful or interesting, apparently. That looks like three large trash bags in the foreground. But some stuff was useful. These dishes, for example, were long ago replaced with real glass plates and bowls, but I was fairly sure there were people out there who could use some cheap crappy plastic dishes, at least until they break:

The dishes, along with a variety of other objects, like these rocker/gamer chairs that we bought when the young men in our family were quite small (i.e., quite a few years ago), and an array of duffle bags that apparently got dumped in the shed and were later replaced because we couldn't find them, were all given away on Freecycle:

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Then there were these lovely galvanized pipes, which come with another typical family tale:

We bought those pipes the year we first came to Dodge, thinking we could use them to build a sukkah. What we didn't anticipate was that the weight of the pipes made the structure unsupportable. The sukkah we built with those pipes came tumbling down. Several times. Once with Media Guy in the middle. We used to have a picture of Media Guy surrounded by the collapsed sukkah, but as far as we can tell, we lost the camera with those pictures while on a family trip. Since then, we have been more diligent about downloading pictures to a computer after we take them.

The pipes went to a program for training plumbers. I do love Freecycle!

Eventually, the Old Shed was more-or-less empty:

What to do with an empty Old Shed? Put STUFF back in, of course. Actually, in the picture above you can see that we already moved a few things in. Those were some boards and bamboo mats that we use on top of our current sukkah. They were already in the Old Shed, but we neatened them up a bit.

After that, we moved our Passover dishes into the Old Shed.

And the rest of the sukkah stuff, -- actually just the lightweight poles that now form the frame of our sukkah, which you can get a glimpse of in an older post somewhere below.

And THEN!! Wow! Shelves in the New Shed were also cleaned out because most of the STUFF that we moved into the Old Shed had been in the New Shed:

Or maybe the New Shed wasn't quite so cleaned out:

We seem to have enough empty plastic bags to pick up dog poop from here to eternity. Another case of just tossing things out of sight and then having them conveniently also be out of mind.