If you read my last post then you know that Jay’s stepdad passed away at the beginning of September. And yes, the list was found. Jay’s aunt discovered it in one of the many filing cabinets. It was in an unlabeled folder. Because of course it was. *sigh*

Jay has spent a lot of his free time (which has also been limited) trying to help his mom to sort and clear out the huge amount of things that his stepdad left behind. This man was born at the end of the Great Depression so that was a big part of how he was raised. Which is why we found a bread box filled with used twine that had been wound up and tied together. It’s also why I found a cigar box filled with OLD pull handles from rope-pulled starters. Seriously. There were probably 20 of these handles in the box.

I have definitely benefitted, though. All of these were found in his garage:

I believe they were located near the 12 paint roller handles and across the garage from the 30 pipe wrenches hanging on the walls (that doesn’t count the numerous other pipe wrenches in the two large tool chests against the wall). Also, this does not include all of the stuff located at their camp (two hours away) or in the garages at the apartments he owned in town. According to Jay’s mom, every time he couldn’t find something he just went out and bought a new one. He also didn’t like dragging his tools from one place to another so he had full sets of stuff at the house, at camp and at the garages.

Jay’s company makes the handles for the majority of pipe wrenches that you can buy here in the States. I told him that he ought to propose a huge cost savings measure by returning all of the pipe wrenches we can find and tossing them back into the furnace to be melted down again. He didn’t think that would work.

Since Jay is neck-deep in all of this clearing out of the properties it’s made him take stock of his situation at home. After spending a day throwing out twine, old toothbrushes, and a zillion random pieces of hardware he came home and did some cleaning up in the basement.

This is kind of how it looked this spring (more had been added since then):

In fact, a lot of the stuff in this next picture ended up surrounding the chair:

As of today it looks like this:

The weekend that we were really involved in cleaning out Karen’s garage I told Jay that we needed to get the piano out of the living room.

Since I have the baby grand in the family room I don’t play the spinet in the living room. We’d tried giving it away for two years, but nobody wants a piano. We’d torn one apart a few years ago to make room for this one, so we pulled this one apart as well.

Jay kept some of the wood, but most of it we had my dad pick up and take home to burn out back. The guy who was scrapping the metal from Karen’s garage also took the cast iron harp and other metal pieces that we pulled off of this instrument.

I kept the keys because I feel like there’s something really neat that we can do with them, we just have to think of it. Then it hit me…

A puzzle for pianists!

There are only 88 pieces, but it’s VERY challenging. Especially if you have somebody helping you who doesn’t know anything about piano music.

“Say, do you have an extra F Sharp hanging around over there?”

“No, all I have is this G Flat that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere.”

(Sorry… nerdy musician humor…)

We did manage to solve it, though.

Once the piano was out of there I decided to try moving the couch to a different spot.

It’s different, but I’m starting to really like it.

Jay says that we should get a “real” chair for over near the fire place, but I kind of like his bench there.

The couch also makes a very nice place to sit while watching the birds. I will keep this arrangement until the day after Thanksgiving. Then I’ll move everything back to make room for the tree in front of the fireplace. We’ll see what happens when the Christmas stuff comes down.

In the meantime I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting. A lot of the things I’m making are Christmas gifts that I can’t post on here. Also, I have an idea floating around my brain about possibly filming podcasts and putting them on YouTube. We’ll have to see how far I actually get with that! I mean, do we really need another person yapping away on YouTube about crochet or yarn?