Undecking the halls
Happy new year to you and yours!
Today's one of those days. If you are one to make resolutions, you begin the year with something to accomplish or at least something to prove. If not, you go on, knowing that the calendar has turned over and the slate is clear.
In my case, it's back to work tomorrow.
I've been off for most of the past two-plus weeks, working two days last week. It's been a wonderful break from travel, e-mails, conference calls and the like, but we'll get back into the swing of things tomorrow with a two-day business trip. Luckily the flights both ways are direct and relatively short!
I titled today's post to correspond with how we spent part of our Sunday. We un-decorated our house!
To be fair, we live in a smallish patio home, so we don't have lots and lots of decorations for Christmas. We have a prelighted tree, which saves some headaches, wreathes on our entry door and the door from our garage, and some other tabletop items. That doesn't sound like a lot.
But when I took it down, it involved something along the lines of five or six storage containers, plus a box and large bag for the tree.
The type of tubs we use has evolved since we bought this house some twenty-two years ago, and mostly it's dictated by the size of the opening to our attic space, above our garage. Luckily I continue to fit through the opening, or we'd have an entirely different problem!
Anyway, we used some tubs we bought at Sears just after moving here for some time. They were a little thin but were the right dimensions to fit through that opening, plus they were tall enough to hold a fair amount of items. As they cracked and split (thin materials) we replaced them with Rubbermaid Roughneck tubs, which held up much better. But somewhere along the line a couple of those were also ruined by temperature extremes and we wound up with a variety of shapes and sizes of containers, the majority of which coming from my mother-in-law's former house.
After wrestling these larger tubs through the opening to remove the contents and to then put them back in the attic empty until after the holidays, I told my wife that we would have to find some better-sized alternatives when we packed it all up.
Thanksgiving weekend turned into the week after Christmas pretty suddenly, it seemed, and I hadn't done a thing toward swapping these out. So I went to run errands one day last week and stopped by a discount store in hopes of finding the Roughnecks, my preferred container.
Alas, they were nowhere to be found. Online searches all showed "out of stock" or "not available," although one brave Amazon-connected retailer was charging more than double the original price for his limited stock. No, thanks.
Before leaving that discount store I bought a stack of another brand of tubs, all of which seemed to be constructed well enough. But when I got them home I discovered that getting them through the attic entrance would also require the kind of contortions that I was determined to avoid.
So I put them back into the car with the intent of returning them.
Meanwhile, my wife and I decided to go ahead with the purchase of a car seat for our youngest grandchild, as we no longer had the last one. We had spotted one at Costco on a previous trip, so off we went.
Amazingly, they had a large display of all things organizational, including, you guessed it, storage containers. Luckily I had the dimensions of the Rubbermaid items that fit, and a tape measure, so measured the options and settled on five tubs (with integrated lids!) that met the size requirements.
Put it all away the following day, and was delighted to find that they worked beautifully, thus making the undecoration project a success with less angst than the previous couple of years!
So I suppose the moral of the story is to persevere, don't settle, and you'll find what you want. I did!
Today's one of those days. If you are one to make resolutions, you begin the year with something to accomplish or at least something to prove. If not, you go on, knowing that the calendar has turned over and the slate is clear.
In my case, it's back to work tomorrow.
I've been off for most of the past two-plus weeks, working two days last week. It's been a wonderful break from travel, e-mails, conference calls and the like, but we'll get back into the swing of things tomorrow with a two-day business trip. Luckily the flights both ways are direct and relatively short!
I titled today's post to correspond with how we spent part of our Sunday. We un-decorated our house!
To be fair, we live in a smallish patio home, so we don't have lots and lots of decorations for Christmas. We have a prelighted tree, which saves some headaches, wreathes on our entry door and the door from our garage, and some other tabletop items. That doesn't sound like a lot.
But when I took it down, it involved something along the lines of five or six storage containers, plus a box and large bag for the tree.
The type of tubs we use has evolved since we bought this house some twenty-two years ago, and mostly it's dictated by the size of the opening to our attic space, above our garage. Luckily I continue to fit through the opening, or we'd have an entirely different problem!
Anyway, we used some tubs we bought at Sears just after moving here for some time. They were a little thin but were the right dimensions to fit through that opening, plus they were tall enough to hold a fair amount of items. As they cracked and split (thin materials) we replaced them with Rubbermaid Roughneck tubs, which held up much better. But somewhere along the line a couple of those were also ruined by temperature extremes and we wound up with a variety of shapes and sizes of containers, the majority of which coming from my mother-in-law's former house.
After wrestling these larger tubs through the opening to remove the contents and to then put them back in the attic empty until after the holidays, I told my wife that we would have to find some better-sized alternatives when we packed it all up.
Thanksgiving weekend turned into the week after Christmas pretty suddenly, it seemed, and I hadn't done a thing toward swapping these out. So I went to run errands one day last week and stopped by a discount store in hopes of finding the Roughnecks, my preferred container.
Alas, they were nowhere to be found. Online searches all showed "out of stock" or "not available," although one brave Amazon-connected retailer was charging more than double the original price for his limited stock. No, thanks.
Before leaving that discount store I bought a stack of another brand of tubs, all of which seemed to be constructed well enough. But when I got them home I discovered that getting them through the attic entrance would also require the kind of contortions that I was determined to avoid.
So I put them back into the car with the intent of returning them.
Meanwhile, my wife and I decided to go ahead with the purchase of a car seat for our youngest grandchild, as we no longer had the last one. We had spotted one at Costco on a previous trip, so off we went.
Amazingly, they had a large display of all things organizational, including, you guessed it, storage containers. Luckily I had the dimensions of the Rubbermaid items that fit, and a tape measure, so measured the options and settled on five tubs (with integrated lids!) that met the size requirements.
Put it all away the following day, and was delighted to find that they worked beautifully, thus making the undecoration project a success with less angst than the previous couple of years!
So I suppose the moral of the story is to persevere, don't settle, and you'll find what you want. I did!
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