Friday, February 24, 2012

Week 3 Progress Report: Cleaning Out the Chemical Cabinet

I don't have a car.
I have to run my errands in the evenings or on my husband's days off --and, like this week, on his staycations.
Speaking of which, he's been indispensible to this basement clean up. He's been finishing up little projects which have been waiting down here.
Like the rocking chair. It broke just before Christmas.
Yesterday, it returned to the living room.
My husband also fixed a drawer which belonged to a dresser we found in an alley last summer. (It was holding up the rocking chair.) He and my son brought the dresser in from the garage yesterday.
So, instead of that mess up above, now, I have this:
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One of the biggest projects around here, though, is cleaning out this unassuming cabinet.

It is the chemical cabinet and we built it when the kids were small to keep them out of things which could hurt them. As you can see by their paint job--they understood!
My husband and I did this one together. He started while I was looking for the camera--so this is after a few minutes of his emptying the cabinet.

Oh my.
Bottles of Easy Off from a friend who moved away--oh six or so years ago maybe?
Lots of fertilizers for house plants. (We have two house plants. A pothos and a corn plant. They are lucky to get water and they know it.)
Lots of weed and feed and bottles of herbicides. Ant killer. Tent sealer. Turpentine. Mineral Spirits. Sanding sealer. Every sort of caulking known to man. Pre-mixed tile adhesive--from a job I did too many years ago to count. And so on.
Most abundant, by far, was the paint. Cans and cans of paint. Testers. Quarts. Gallons. Even automobile paint in colours for vehicles we don't own anymore!
I opened almost every tin, inspected it and then passed it to Daedalus to bang the lid back on. He didn't ant any spilling in his jeep--not even dried up crusty bits.

It really doesn't look like much after all that.
I'm hoping he'll let me paint it. He's rather sentimental about the kids' "artwork" on there.

4 comments :

Anne At Large said...

Wow, that's a lot of paint! So nice to think of that all getting disposed of and not lingering in your home. I shudder to think of the chemicals in my (inherited) chemical cabinet. My grandmother was a traditionalist when it came to that kind of stuff - the more, the better.

And it must be nice to have the rocking chair back in the living room!

Unknown said...

Great job getting all that out of the house. We purged all our paint about a year ago. I can tell you are making some real progress.

onshore said...

We've spreaded out the chemicals we have in our apartment so it does not seem like we have much. But I'm thinking we should really go through those and I'm sure we well have about the same result as you did.
I'm kind of touched by the fact that your husband does not want to cover up the kids paintings.

scb said...

Wow. I must get rid of some of the things under the sinks, "inherited" from Mum & Dad. But at least there are no cans of paint here!

I kind of like the kids' artwork, too, but then, I'm very sentimental.

I've just tagged you in a Q&A -- participate or ignore as works for you. http://serenityathome.blogspot.com/2012/02/plan-b-q-type-meme.html

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