Decluttering and Decorating at Mom's

We've done this before.

If I look too often at old "before" and "after" pictures of my Mom's place, I can easily get discouraged. The evidence suggests that all of the efforts we made this summer to decrapify and pretty up her house will only end in near-chaos again.

We declutter and I decorate: and then she brings home "finds" from Value Village, things she thinks are good for the house, or just things she thinks were good buys. And soon, everything piles up again and chaos overwhelms.

And in fact, with the effort to clear out the trailer as quickly as possible in order to get it rented, Mom's place is currently a cluttered disaster, once again. But I'm hoping it won't stay that way for too long.

Because this time, this time it feels different, even though there are some very old habits that need to be broken.

I realise I risk sounding like I am protesting too much.

But truly.

Sometime in July, Mom was hospitalized for pneumonia. They kept her there for 10 days. While she was in hospital, the person my Mom got to care for Noah, my nine year old nephew who lives with her, let Noah and her own son of the same age just trash the house. There's no other way to put it. Used dishes with dried food lay on every surface. There were toys everywhere. The floors were filthy. Counter tops were sticky. The one around the sink was orange. There was food smeared into her white slipcovered couch. When Mother returned to her home she was compelled to clean. Instead of sleeping, she cleaned through her first night home from the hospital.

We chatted soon after and she declared she was going to use the strength of the steroids she was prescribed to declutter. The prescription would last until the end of August: would I help her?

I jumped. Of course I jumped.

I started with painting her living room--something I promised to do back in January. But to do that, she had to empty out the adjoining study which, at that time, was an overwhelming disaster.

She emptied out the room in record time. I was shocked. Later, I found bags of things she took out to the deck--and I was terribly worried she would just leave everything in the bags--and the stuff inside would either become lost or simply brought back in and nothing would be decluttered.

But, she sorted through it all eventually.

When we moved everything out of the living room, she spent days sorting through her dvds and her vast collection of cds.

That became the pattern, even though it alarmed me. She would empty out a space and then sort, toss and donate. I purchased a book on organizing for people with ADHD for her.

After the living room, we moved on to the area by her back door. I ran to Ikea and bought a kitchen cabinet and hung it with my husband's help. I painted and organized a closet.

I painted the hallway to the stairs. We installed a light. We put up some of her artwork.

We schemed and investigated how to get more lights up in the hall.
We did a quick organizing project in her eating area so that all of her aromatic oils were in one place.
I started revamping the front entry way.

In short order, we moved on to the bathroom. I painted the walls the same colour as the living room and painted a cabinet she'd had bought on sale and buried in the garage. We mounted it. Then Mom installed a new light fixture and I painted the eighties wood vanity navy blue.

I only have a photo of it primed. The doors aren't even back on. 

I was about to move on to the study when The Trailer happened. Now that it is all set to rent, I will be focusing again on Mom's place and picking up where we left off.

This is how things were when The trailer happened. I'll be starting in here with Ikea furniture and storage pieces on Monday.

Stay tuned.

The Trailer

I am sorry I have disappeared off the face of the Earth like that.

Like most trailers that have been parked (as this one is in a trailer park) there's an addition built on to the side of the trailer proper. This one has three rooms, shotgun style. This is the first one, the entry.

I have been so busy I can barely breathe.

This is the second. We call this the bonus room. It is wired for a television cable. The junction box identifies it as the den. I have since painted the ceiling.

It started in mid-July with my Mom getting pneumonia--for the third time in the last twelve months. When she was released from hospital she was highly motivated to declutter and clear out her house. The doctors had also prescribed quite a high dose of prednisone to keep her lungs clear--and she used the energy and clear headedness it gave her to make the million and one decisions necessary. She asked me to help.

This is the third room, the "back bedroom." My sister's three year old son had this room. There was a lot of marker on the walls, the door and trim. I've painted the room, and door since this photo was taken.

I jumped.

Back at the entry, looking into the kitchen. 

We made excellent progress. It was all quite exciting and wonderful (we decluttered the living room and threw out masses of dvds and cds and I painted the room. We turned to the upstairs bathroom and tossed mountains of bath products and towels and I painted the room and the vanity and we reorganized closets (and I painted them, of course) and put up cupboards and shelves and painted some more....when suddenly, we had to stop.

The kitchen and the living room/dining room are essentially one big room. That's not"wallpaper" in the kitchen. Those are pre-printed wall panels. 

As the prednisone dose was being lowered to wean my Mom's body off of it--my sister broke up with her husband and left the house trailer she'd been living in with her two small children. They had been three months behind in rent to my Mom. They left a lot behind. I didn't understand the extent of it and welcomed a few weeks to myself as I let Mom sort things out.

Living/Dining from the kitchen

Living/Dining from the Living room window. It is not your imagination.The walls are different. 

But I was alarmed at the amount of things coming from the trailer into my mother's house every single day. And then as the leaves on the trees were turning, I realised Mom could not handle it herself. Breathing became more and more difficult. She started moving more slowly. She needed naps.

The hallway to the rest of the trailer. The walls are different, here too. 

So, I jumped.

This is the "first" bedroom. I have since repainted it. The door leads to the bathroom.

I have spent every single spare moment I have over there packing things up, sorting things into piles of garbage, recyclables, and donations. On my journey home (it's a half hour each way) I've been delivering an entire jeep stuffed full of things to Value Village. Today, I realized we've been cleaning up after my sister (and her family) for six solid weeks. I've painted two rooms and a door. Tomorrow, I paint a ceiling. We've replaced light fixtures, we've had to purchase curtain rods and blinds (my sister took those) and I still need to install them.

The bathroom has been updated by previous owners: but the layout is odd. The tub is opposite the toilet. The entry from the hallway is opposite the vanity at the foot of the tub.

We skipped Thanksgiving this year, too, so we could clean out the shed.

The laundry room is in the hallway outside the bathroom (the tub is right behind the machines) and main bedroom. Yes, they left a small load laundry in the hamper.

These pictures were taken when we had it almost ready for the cleaners at the beginning of October. Our plan is to rent it out for a while, at least a year, and then use those funds to spiff it up and sell it. Meanwhile, I have a lot to learn about how house trailers are constructed and how we can install an Ikea kitchen.

The main bedroom. It was renovated, (The ceiling is drywall and not the usual drop panel affair. There is no door.) The bed was left behind with no way to take it down. We're hoping the good folks at Ikea can advise us and give us the appropriate allen keys. 

Looking back down the hallway to the kitchen/dining room. The door on the right goes outside to a nice little deck.