Okay.  New Year’s is done and while Christmas isn’t over for a few more days, we won’t be able to do anything for Three Kings Day this year, so I have no excuses.

Holiday is over.  Time to get back to work unpacking.

We are at that point where the essentials are unpacked, so we can get away with not unpacking more and still be able to function, despite the chaos.  So it’s really easy to get distracted with the many other things that crop up.  We are also not taking more things to the shed for storage right now, because of the cold.  It’s not far from the house, but loading and unloading the vehicle in these temperatures can lead to frostbite.  So it will wait.

My goal now is to unpack at least one box a day.

This is not as small a goal as it seems.

In order to unpack a box, that requires a place to unpack its contents into.

To give an example.

My FIL is very generous and, when he got himself a Keurig and began ordering pods online regularly, he would order extra for us as a gift.  We were getting cases of Keurig varieties every month.  This was faster than we actually consumed them, so they quickly added up until we thanked him but let him know we were good for a long while.

When we started packing up the room they were in, I even found about 6 unopened boxes that had been set aside, then covered by something else and forgotten.

I filled a size large box of unopened boxes of pods, plus another medium box mostly full of opened ones, plus my daughters had more opened boxes on the third floor.

We ended up setting the Keurig machine up in the living room, near my crochet corner.  The shelf it’s on has a bunch of open boxes of pods for immediate use stuffed inside, but there was no where near enough room for all the opened boxes, never mind the unopened ones.

I decided that I would store the rest of the boxes in one of the bottom shelves of our large divider shelf between the living and dining rooms.

In order to do that, we had to move the things that were in front of it.  This included 4 extra chairs, used when we have enough company to extend the table.  My sweet daughters checked out all of the dining chairs that were here and picked out the 4 most stable ones for daily use, then hauled the remaining 4 into the basement.  A couple of them are heavy oak, and the design of these chairs is cumbersome, so this was not an easy job.

Then I had to find temporary places for the other stuff in front of the shelves, move the litter box out of the corner (we still haven’t figured out a permanent spot for that), clean the space the litter box was in, and only then could I finally access and open the shelves I was after.

I completely filled the shelves, and still had to find a way to jam a bit more into the shelf I’ve got the Keurig machine sitting on.

I’m going to set up a separate garbage can, just for the pods.  When it’s full, I’ll empty the contents into the compost bucket, then keep the cleaned pods for starting seeds.  Considering how many pods we’ve got, I’ll likely have plenty to do crafts with, too.

What?  Did you think we were just going to throw them all in the garbage?  ;-)

End result: I got a size large box, plus half a size medium box, unpacked, meeting my goal of the day, and in the process, cleared out another space that needed to be worked on.

Which is how it’s going to be for the next while, with pretty much every box that is left to be unpacked.

I look forward to when it’s warm enough to move more furniture and boxes to the shed.  There are still several areas I haven’t even looked at, yet.   Like the dresser tucked into a nook between the bathroom and Old Kitchen doors.  I have no idea what’s in it, but on top of it there appears to be a memorial of some kind, for a woman who’s name and face I don’t recognize at all.

Every now and then, I look at it all and it’s so disheartening.  It’s going to take months.  But if I just do that one box a day, it will much more manageable.

And to think I used to like moving.

The Re-farmer