Spring Cleaning

Cosy on a Winter's Day

I know it is not yet spring.   The fire is blazing merrily in the wood stove and there is still snow on the north sides of the hills, but it was past time to take down the remainder of the Christmas decorations  (the tree came down well before Epiphany so the window washers from Advantage Window Cleaning, www.awcnm.com  could actually get to the windows!)   The Advantage guys did a great job and were extremely pleasant, hence my referral above.

I clean my own house, and regularly wash the inside of the windows, but ladders and I have a love/hate relationship ever since a ladder slipped while I was cleaning the top of a twenty foot tall window in our last house.  So I am not washing the outside of the windows on our three story house.  It took months for my fingernails to grow back after I tried to slow my fall down the wall where I landed on one of four matching antique dining chairs which sadly could not be repaired.  Fortunately I was luckier...the nails grew back, the bruises faded and only the fear of ladders over ten feet remains. 

Christmas decor is coming down! 

Saving the decorations for next year.

Martha Stewart would not approve!

Probably should have used a liner in my old ironstone soup tureen before I put in the frogs to hold the greens.  Oh well, a little alcohol to dissolve the sap, and some vinegar and it is as good as new.

Vinegar to the rescue

Vacuuming up the pine needles made me want to clean and organize..so I rearranged the living room.  This is something I do often.  We have a challenging space....hardly any walls, lots of windows, a staircase on one side, and an enormous TV even though we only watch movies on Netflix and slide shows of our travels on it.  To compound the problem, we also have a ten foot long dining table and a lot of chairs to seat our large extended family and multitude of guests.  Here is the table set for ten for Easter last year...

My friend, Cheryl, has small intimate dinner parties for six.  I tend to entertain mostly 12 to 14 for dinner.  All that work cleaning, cooking, arranging flowers...it seems only economical.   Also, I must confess to a secret hoarding tendency.  I inherited lots of china and some beautiful linens from family members and I don't want to part with any of it.  In fact, I continue to buy pieces of my great-grandmothers white Haviland china when I find them in antique stores and estate sales and I can hardly bear to pass up napkins at garage sales.  Of course, I look for opportunities to justify all this stuff and entertain often for large groups.  We are having 24 for dinner on Friday to plan our late spring river trip in Alaska. 

Consequently I have STORAGE ISSUES!  How do you store all your stuff?