Skip to main content

Day 23: Rugs and windows

Busy day. In addition to completing a class for my telework requirement, and administering e-Learning to two elementary school children, I got the following done:

66. ✅ Roll out the area rug in the basement

Not worth a photo, because the rug is kind of old and ugly, but I'm all about decluttering these days. The rug was just rolled up along one wall, taking up a lot of space. Rolling it out on the floor not only reclaims that space, but also gives the kids a more comfortable place to play compared with a cold basement laminate floor. I know it sounds easy, but this took a lot of time and effort, because I basically had to remove everything from the room, including a chest freezer and two large pieces of exercise equipment.

58. ✅ Add blackout material to the irregular dining room window.

In the three rooms of the house where we spend most of our time, there are large irregular trapezoidal windows. They look great because they let in a lot of natural light. The bad thing is that they also let in a lot of heat in the summer, and we don't have air conditioning. We already have cloth screens covering them to try to filter some of the light, but it's just not enough. I purchased some blackout material with the intention of recovering those screens to be more light-blocking. Unfortunately while attempting a proof of concept with the dining room screen, I butchered the hell out of the cloth. As I was dumping the shredded cloth in the garbage, a light went on and I remembered a roll of adhesive white shelf paper in the closet. On a whim I grabbed the roll, cut a sheet to size, and stuck it right onto the window pane. I had to wait until the afternoon to see the effects, but seems to more effectively block the light. I think this will be my strategy going forward with the other two windows. And if it continues to be a problem we'll also look into hanging some curtains somehow. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Day 91: Cleanliness

73. ✅  Clear out the flower bed in the front yard Two words: scorched earth. Garden hoe: loosen the dirt. (Broke that hoe.) Shovel: remove the dirt. Sieve: Filter out all the crap in the dirt. What was left was a smooth patch of barren soil. I'm sure there are undesirables lurking beneath the surface, so I'll let it lie for a few days before I do anything else with it. 51.  ✅  Deal with the shred pile This took days. I've been accumulating junk mail, old bills, and literally anything with my name, a family member's name, or our address on it for several months resulting in a two-foot tall stack of papers. It couldn't be done all at once, because (A) the shredder kept overheating, and (B) I kept running out of places to store the shreds. (They take up considerably more room than the unshredded sheets of paper.) 75  ✅  Clean off the workbench Getting rid of the shred pile was the main roadblock in completing this task, but it's done. And now there's a bike up ...