“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 999 (Sunday) – closet work

A task that has been on the house to-do list for nearly six years was done today. Not by me. I was playing Scrabble with Mom. It was StepDad to the rescue again, slaying the tasks for which I lack the tools, knowledge, and skill set to handle myself.

There is a closet that sits between the two bedrooms upstairs, with a door to it in each room. It seems it may have belonged to the spare room, but at some point, the doorknob was removed and the door was covered in the same paneling as the room. When that door was opened, it exposed the backside of a plywood backwall.

From the main bedroom, two louvered doors opened to reveal the ductwork for the central heat and A/C and four slanted shelves that seemed like shoe racks, which was exciting until attempting to use it. It didn’t take long to discover it was possibly a good concept with poor execution that made it mostly a waste of space. The shelves were twice as deep as any shoes, and held about five individual shoes which didn’t sit well on them and just fell over or slid off. Because the shelves were angled, they weren’t very useful for anything else.

Today, StepDad and StepBro were over and in about three hours, they reconfigured the closet while Mom and I visited and competed over the board of letter tiles. The closet access is now from the spare room and the shelves are level, making them much more user friendly. From the main bedroom, the louvered doors open to reveal not much more than plywood right now and space to hang things like belts and scarves, but a full-length mirror may be installed there. No rush.

Now I need to figure out what to store in the newly functional spare room closet that will have the greatest impact on the mess in the room. For now, one shelf holds a dozen or more binders of slides and negatives from my prolific early days of traditional photography. The top shelf holds four or five assorted vintage and recent costume hats, with at least twice as many more still scattered around the room. Over there is a top hat. There’s a stack of fedoras. There are a couple boleros. Between hats and vintage purses, I could open a shop. Getting rid of stuff will help, but that may require intense psychological counseling to plow through.

Snow!

Within a half hour of the closet work being done and the family unit heading out, it was a surprise to see the snow falling around 3:30 and the car lightly coated. The weather reports I saw over the past few days seemed to indicate that the snow was expected later in the day, and not really in my area. Or I read it wrong, which wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe instead of Finnish language classes I should focus on finding a class in weather report comprehension. 

There was the weekly run to fetch Winston’s roasted chicken and the freshy printed holiday cards were picked up. Upon arriving home in the steady snowfall, it occurred to me I should have bought some snow melt. The remaining half bag from last year has become solid and the scoop broke. The snow was falling steadily. The phone weather app said it would snow would continue “for 120 minutes,” which has been the message for four hours now.