Before and After

Look at these pictures of our bedroom. Can you tell which are the before and which are the after?













Today I slaved away the whole dang day cleaning our bedroom from top to bottom. We've been so busy lately that unfortunately our bedroom became the holding place of random Junk To Be Dealt With. Our bedroom was a total total mess. I'm going to bare all here and admit that it almost looked as bad as some of those Hoarders on that show, Hoarders. Most of the time we had to step carefully to make it to the bed. I just want you to understand the magnitude of my undertaking today. Because not only did I clean it all up, I CLEANED it all up. No temporary putting places. No piles to be dealt with later. No hidden closet disaster mess. No shove things in another room and clean that room another day. I cleaned the bedroom, I cleaned and organized the closet, and I put things away properly. Everything. It was a masterpiece. It was wonderful. It was perfect.

Have you guessed yet that those nice lovely pictures you see are the BEFORE pictures?

Murray came home late tonight, which gave me the time I needed to have everything in order for the Big Reveal. He was appropriately grateful and impressed. And then as I settled down into the bed, ready to relax for the evening, I told him the bad news.

In dusting our bed headboard (which is essentially a bookshelf), the remote for our ceiling fan/light fell behind the headboard and got stuck. We need this remote. We rely on this remote. And without the remote, the light/fan is stuck on its current settings. In this case, lights off.

I had tried myself to get it unstuck. A hanger wouldn't reach. Neither would the rod that opens and closes our blinds. A broom stick could reach it but didn't solve the problem and in fact may have gotten it more stuck. (Actually, in this process, the lights turned on.)

So Murray and I got to work together, trying to solve the problem of the stuck remote. I'll spare you ALL the details but suffice it to say that nothing could be done but to actually take our mattress off the bed, empty the under bed storage of all its books (our bed is essentially a library), pull the bed frame out from the headboard, and then rock the headboard until the remote finally got unstuck and fell out the bottom. (The fan had turned itself off during the unwedging attempts, so we were doing all of this in the dark and with no fan.)

Our neighbors, I'm sure, thought we were having an extremely fun evening.

On the bright side, I had been saving "clean under the bed" for a later chore, but we did that tonight too.

So, two hours after starting to retrieve the remote, our bedroom looks like the before pictures again. Phew. There was no way I was going to go to sleep without reachieving my peaceful wonderful bedroom sanctuary. And we are relaxing under a great fan with a nice working light. Yay for us! The whole house is thisclose to being perfect!!


-- Posted from my iPhone, with apologies for any typos.