Round Two--Juneau

Okay, this nearly killed me. We went straight from moving and cleaning the house in Washington to doing the same to the house in Juneau. Not only did we sort through 10 years of accumulation, we were cleaning up the residue of construction on the sunroom (that we’ve been working on for 6 years and finally finished so we could rent out the house (isn’t that always the way). 

But check out this gorgeous room! Sergei (our contractor) did such a fabulous job of finishing the stairs and the framing for the seating. We spent all the time we could in here while we were working on the house. It's quite the serene room, now. Our new tenants are going to love it...quite ironic.

Husband had worked on finishing all of the “almost done” projects we had hanging out during the weeks before he came to Washington AND he got his home office cleaned out (quite a feat since I think he still had unopened boxes from when we moved in ten years ago). I know he had software boxes for software he no longer owned…

Husband did have another brilliant idea and hired some of the high school boys from the local football team to help us move out some of the debris we were getting rid of. A nicer group of kids I couldn't imagine! And REALLY hard workers. My hat is off to the parents of these future stars!

So, though we were in good shape, we had a long way to go. 14 hour days of sorting and packing were demoralizing in that it never looked as though we were making any progress. We had to keep thinking about what not to take and what did we really not want to live without for the next 6 years (it could be a shorter time, but we know it won’t be any longer since that’s when I’ll retire). I can’t tell you how many bags we took to the dump, but we filled the UHaul trailer twice and still had seven more bags on our last day…not to mention the carloads of household goods that went to Salvation Army.
To top it all off, both the Salvation Army and St. Vincent's had stopped accepting clothing donations. If you aren't from a pretty small town, this seems odd to you, but it does happen often in Juneau.