Posted on 04/15/2005 6:38:21 AM PDT by grellis
Has everyone filed their taxes?
Its that time of year again--the snow has melted, the days are getting longer, it is finally spring! If you're like me, that means it is time to deep clean the house. I no longer have an excuse for not cleaning the outside of the windows. It is finally warm enough for me to take down the Christmas lights and wreath. Time to pack up the parkas, ice skates, hats and gloves.
It is also tax time, a great time to deep clean the paperwork that has accumulated over the past twelve months. Do you save every receipt? Do you use the "circular file" a little too brazenly?
Spring also means yard work. Do you garden? Have you cleared away the remnants of winter debris and begun planting yet? Or do you know there is at least one hard frost lurking in the calendar, waiting to wipe out your seedlings?
Share with us any spring cleaning tips you have!
GROSS.............We always fought over whose turn it was because we HATED doing it.
I may have to sweep my floors 3 or 4 times a day - but I'll take that anytime over vaccuumming.
Understand.
I have wonderful memories of my time there. It's been more than 10 years since I've been there and so I know much has changed - but I always had fun. I was a city kid and being there gave me a taste for the outside world.
The summers I spent there made it extremely easy for this NYC born and raised girl to move to Dover, Delaware when she was 22.........it's been a very, very long time since I have had any desire to live in a city.
And now, 23 years after I moved out of THE city, the closest "city" to me has a total year-round population of 3,500 - I love it!
Appreciate the tips!!!!!!!!!
ROFL!!
Good grief woman!!!!!!!!! You are AMAZING........
You had to remind me about the screens, didn't ya????/
I despise rescreening screens - but I've got a stack of them I absolutely must do........as soon as hubby hauls the roll of screening in from the barn.
We're having a strange spring in N. California. We're getting lots of rain still. Usually it really clears up in March, but we're still getting it. At least now, we're getting a few sunny days in between.
Anyway, my point is that I haven't really done all that spring cleaning because it still feels like winter around here.
I did manage to do one thing. After 9 months since we moved, I have finally unpacked our garage. On the nice days, I have been busy working in the garage. I have one more thing to do before it is really ready for business. I bought a dresser and a hutch last year for my daughter. It needed to be painted. I finished the dresser in the fall. I do a lot of the work outside, and I still need to do the hutch. I'm hoping I finish it next week, then I'll put away the painting supplies. Yea!!!
I also cleaned out my wonderful refrigerator. Yuck!
I need to plant some flowers around my yard. That's one of my big items.
We started going to a tax guy a few years ago because of some issues with stock options. Unfortunately, hubby forgot to make the appointment, and we had to file an extension.
Our garage at our old house was horrible.
For one thing, the old house had tiny closets. My girls shared a room, and there was no room for anything but their beds and clothes. That meant most of their toys were stored in the garage.
In San Jose, you can only throw away one trashcan full of trash each week and then you can throw away unlimited recycling. If you have more, you have to call people to haul it away, or you have to take it to the dumpster yourself.
I seem to collect lots of trash, and it just sits in my garage for a long time. I usually call someone to haul it away about twice a year.
Anyway, I think the new house will be better. All the kids have their own rooms, and they all have big closets. Plus there is a playroom with a huge walk-in closet. All the toys fit in their rooms or the playroom. We still need to get rid of lots of toys. We have toooooo many bulky stuffed animals, but we do have the room to store them here.
I would not like to rescreen them, washing them is bad enough! Last year we got our wood floors refinished and the mess was disturbing, to say the least. I told him when it was time for the second floor, I am going to move. It would be easier! LOL! At least the whole house got a good scrubbing then. I also forgot to add cleaning the track lights and ceiling fans after we reverse their direction. Then, how does anyone balance FReeping time with cleaning time. If I am doing one then I am definitely neglecting the other!
I'm late to the koffee-klatch, as usual. We started our Spring Cleaning and gardening prep a while back. Mr. Okie made my vegetable garden a third again as big, and tilled a dump-truckful of mushroom soil into it (it's a raised bed.)
I started seedlings of both veggies and flowers on Valentine's Day weekend and planted last weekend in the garden and will do the flowers and herbs tomorrow. My peas are struggling to come up, but the salad garden is up.
Mr. Okie put two loads of topsoil in the yard and graded and seeded it last weekend. It is finally flat as a pancake. I see croquet in the evenings after the grass gets established. Our crosus' are done and so are the daffodils. The tulips are blooming, my glads and iris are up and so are the hostas. And, a bonus this spring; the lilac that hasn't bloomed for the past three years is blooming! All the fruit trees blossomed and are leafing out, too.
I'm going to scrub off the porch tomorrow and haul the plant stands out after I get elder son to move what's left of the woodpile off the porch and back out to the big woodpile in the side-yard.
A neighbor had some oak trees removed and gave us the wood, so we'll need to split and stack that as well.
I've already cut the grass twice and put the boys to work pulling weeds. It's so great to be outside again!
I sorted through the kids dressers and moved the heavy coats out of the downstairs closet to the upstairs this morning and am going to wash windows this weekend---in and out!.
I put my foot down about it because not only had we sold one house and bought another - we moved to another state........I didn't want to deal with the hassle.
This year it was because of the screwy tax laws in Delaware - a proportion of hubby's withholding taxes is to Delaware and the rest to Virginia - so we have to file both.
We didn't make an appointment with the accountant - hubby just dropped the paperwork off, they called us 10 laters that it was ready (President's Day) and they dropped it in the mail to us. We got it on Friday - signed the forms, mailed the 1040 back to the accountant and the Delaware return to the Division of Revenue - had the Fed refund within 10 days. Delaware took longer and we still have to write a check to Virginia.
Taxes and bad schools were the 2 main reasons (there were a host of others) that we moved out of Delaware - 2 years later I'm still dealing with the danged taxes and I can't even vote there..........
Closets????????? I am sooooooooooo jealous.
There is a closet in Jax bedroom and a dinky one in the dining room that we put shelves in for a linen closet........there are no other closets in this house. None, nada, zip, zilch.
It only took me about thirty minutes to pull out the "spent" canes and to prune off the tops of last fall's fruiting canes (you get bigger berries and a heavier yield when you do that, I have found). I spent another two hours digging up over 80 daylilies that have been spreading through the raspberry thicket. I pulled out a few thousand daylily bulbs.
I hate daylilies!!!
$2K for the highest end model with all the bells and whistles. I have been saving up for a lower end model, which still runs around $1,300. Like I said, worth every penny. They are not sold in stores but you can find a dealer in the yellow pages. Get a free demonstration, see what you think. They are the Rolls Royce of vacuums and they last forever. My mom has had hers for well over twenty years and it still works like new. I have bought three new vacuums since we moved to Lansing in '93, so I have already wasted close to a grand on vacuums. Never again!
I am officially hanging my head in shame!!!
And here I thought my Simplicity (cost $600 in 1999) was expensive! But it was worth it... works great. As you say, if you add up the cost of replacing cheaper vacuums, you don't come out much different.
That makes my old house look good.
The house that I grew up in had great closets and built in storage. It's much smaller than the house that I'm in now, but it still has more storage. I was soooo spoiled after growin up in that house. I had my own room with a walk-in closet. Then on top of that, the house had a huge 12 x 12 ft laundry room.
My old house was about the same size as the house I grew up in , but it had a lot of wasted space. It had both a large family room, and a large living room. We rarely used the living room, and I would have loved that space in the other parts of the house.
I grew up in Texas, and now live in California. Houses are built differently here. Small kitchens, most houses have laundry hook-ups in the garage, and small bedrooms. I'd rather have only a family room and large bedrooms than a family room, living room, and tiny bedrooms.
OMG - you sound like me!!!!!
I would not like to rescreen them, washing them is bad enough!
No, it is not fun, but it is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying new ones. We do not have central A/C, but even if we did, I still prefer openning windows as much as possible - and so that means screens. I keep looking at one in the kitchen - the very first one I ever rescreened - and cringe because I know I have to redo it. There are holes in it that absolutely, perfectly correspond to the nails of the dog.
Good grief - you are a far better woman than I!!!!!!!!!!
Hubby did bend and break all the metal today for the facia or soffitt (I can never get those straight) but had to do it in the barn because of the wind.
He is out now on a hunt for the black plastic I need for the garden, he didn't find it earlier when he was returning the metal break - hopefully WalMart has it because I do not want to pay the garden center prices. The stuff ain't cheap - but if I can get it for less than $10 a roll I will be a happy camper.
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