One Thing Leads to Another

The past 48 hours have been a little...well, sucky. Not only did my town get another 18" of snow (on top of the prior 30"+ that wasn't fully cleaned up) but I woke up Wednesday morning with a sore throat and aches. I sucked it up (drank copious amounts of TheraFlu) and went to work and regretted it. By the time I woke up Thursday my aches and soreness had more than doubled. I felt like such a baby! So I made a doctor's appointment expecting to hear "You should've gotten a flu shot, here's some antibiotics" but what I heard was much more serious. COPD. What? As in chronic bronchitis and emphysema? Yuppers. Thanks, ma for never taking the doctors in offices nor in hospitals seriously and dismissing their claims that your smoking habit was the cause of my health problems.

While I'm still learning about COPD (and not so eagerly awaiting my own personal nebulizer) I do know that I need to get the smoke out of my apartment. With the little bit of energy I had this morning (thanks to several medications from the doc) I decided that my walls needed to be washed. Smoke clings to everything, so I should get to it.

I started off with a small wall next to the entrance, a very small wall at only 26" wide. So it was me, a rag and an OxyClean mix ready to take to the wall! This little wall packed a big surprise...

So it turns out that I can't remember the last time I washed the walls top to bottom. Living with two dogs I've wiped down the lower halves of the walls and where paw prints would wind up. I guess living with a smoker I should've thought about it a bit more.

I skip around a lot in terms of projects so the next wall I started was near where I spend a lot of time, in the computer room. Are you sensing a tree branch growing out of this post now? This is what I saw after I took the frames off the wall and started cleaning. Eek! Can you count the number of paints by the baseboard? The wires! Ugh! I only have three wires, but look at it! That big grey bundle on the left? Doesn't attach to anything but I'm no electrician so I'm leaving it alone.

 After realizing the cable clips I bought a few days ago were too small to fit the wires coming from my computer, I looked through my well sorted nail and jimma-me-bobbers box and found two of these beauties from when I had cheap blinds. So I pre-drilled two holes with my lil' Dremmel and hand screwed these behind the desk where they now hold up that giant mess of wires.

 Now, this is all that can be seen. If only the board behind my desk came down about 3.5" more they'd be invisible. Then again they'd be pretty hard to reach, considering my desk isn't of the finest craftsmanship.

So this is it now...cleaned up in all ways and missing its drawers! I couldn't get the file drawer back in and decided while it was out that I needed to sort through that. Another post...