Last Saturday as I was checking my usual things on the computer before I started painting, I came across an item in Pete’s email. Pete gathers up all the local info about what is for sale, who is looking to buy what, and who is needing a ride somewhere. My eye was caught on an item about a big sale a local family was having because they were moving. The fact that they were moving was what interested me, since I wasn’t aware of it. I made the mistake of mentioning it to Joan thinking that she would be surprised at the move also.
Joan it seems, already knew about the move, but she was extremely interested in the sale, and told me that we would have to get there early. Luckily, that still gave me enough time to paint my square for the morning.
After arriving at the sale, scanning the merchandise, and purchasing a few items. We were about to get into the truck to go home, when Joan noticed a hutch sitting outside. She was very interested in it for our pantry, which she was starting to have negative thoughts about, since everything was out in the open on the shelf that was there; she was looking for something with doors so the pantry wouldn’t look so cluttered. She thought the hutch would be a lot more attractive in the pantry than the shelf we had.
Our pantry has a very low ceiling and so we got out the tape measure and wrote down the measurements of the hutch, then drove home and measured to see if it would fit, it would. We climbed back into the truck, drove back to McBride, then after learning that the hutch was still there and unsold, Joan walked down to the cash machine at the bank, and the hutch became our new acquisition.
Then we encountered the problem of getting it back to our house. It was in two pieces, a top and the bottom. We were able to get the bottom into the back of my small pickup, but I couldn’t get the top because of the truck’s canopy. Luckily, Ann, with her big pickup was parked next to our truck and Joan went to find her and she said she would bring the top half of the hutch out to our place later, so we loaded the top into her truck.
If I thought my problems were over when we finally got both pieces of the hutch to our house, I was sadly mistaken, the problems were just beginning.
The shelf in our pantry was a lot longer than the hutch, and was overflowing with items and food. It held a lot more than our new hutch would. That meant that everything would have to come off of the shelf, and when the hutch was moved in to take its place, not everything we took off of the old shelf would be able to find a place in the hutch. Joan went to work clearing off the old shelf, and I went out to the shop to put hinges on the middle cabinet door at the bottom of the hutch.
When we bought the hutch we saw the middle door was missing. It was there, but in pieces. The owner had a package of hinges for the door ready to install, so I thought it wouldn’t be too big of a project to hang it.
Unfortunately, once I got the door put together, and the hinges attached, I realized that the hinges that were provided, were the wrong kind of hinge, and so I was not able to hang the door, but no big deal, we could still stock the hutch and I could attach the door later, when I got the correct kind of hinge. (I later discovered that the only hardware store in McBride did not carry the hinge I needed, so I ended up having to order it, and so that job is now put off until next week, when the hinge comes.)
Once Joan had put the things she wanted in the hutch, there was a tremendous amount of things that no longer had a home, several garbage bags were filled with things to take to the dump, but still there were a lot of leftovers that had to be put somewhere else--the nightmare began.
The shelf we took out of the pantry would be the perfect place to put all the leftover items, but it no longer had a home either. The logical place for it was out in my shop, but that was already stuffed to the hilt with all kinds of other possessions, to dear to take to the dump. I would have to clear out a huge amount of space in the shop to put in the shelf, before we could store all the secondary items.
Yesterday I began the gargantuan task of making space in the shop. What could I do with all of the stuff I was clearing out of that space? Well certainly, some of it could go to the dump, so I started filling up the back of my pickup to make a dump run, then I discovered that the dump was closed on Weds and Thurs, so the the stuff would just have to sit in the truck for a couple of days.
Naturally, a lot of the stuff I was removing from the shop, were things that I wanted to keep, so I needed a place to keep it. There was only one other place I could store it--the barn. So before I could move the things from the house to the shop, I had to move the things from the shop to the barn, and since the barn was already pretty full of things of its own, a lot of that stuff had to go somewhere also--most of it to the dump, next time it is open.
I know a lot of all this work is my own fault for always hanging on to things and not wanting to throw items away, because they are still useable and might one day come in handy, but all my storage areas are full, and so whenever we buy something new, everything has to be shifted from one place to another. Getting anything new is starting to be a real headache.
The cable car crossing on the Goat River had been been disabled all summer because of damage to the car during spring high river flows. Fraser Headwaters had purchased a new floor for the car and the plan for yesterday was to put in the new floor and also to change the anchor on the far side of the Goat River, from a downed tree to secured bolts in rock. We were joined on the project by members of the Sustainable Living Leadership Program, who annually Canoe down the Fraser River and camp at the Upper Goat River Trailhead (photo below).
In the summer after I got out of the third grade, my parents took the family on a camping trip to Colorado. It was the first time I had been in the West and it was planned mostly because of my fascination of American Indian culture. When my mother pointed out an orangish western flower and called it an “Indian paintbrush” it registered deeply into my brain because of its association with Native Americans.
