HubMob Weekly Topic: Spring Cleaning Part II So Many Parts

 My room is clean. It's been cleaned. The carpet has been vacuumed and steamed by my beloved son in law, who moved all the furniture except the waterbed to get under it after I pulled everything out from under tables and off the easel. Stuff has been put back on shelves, some of it. The old broken guest chair has been taken out and the good functional armchair with casters on it brought in -- that's upper left in the photo above.

The sheer amount of clutter has expanded. Instead of just the laundry basket of stuff to be sorted and a neat square meter of stacked books and stuff to organize, all the books and magazines from a small storage shelving unit wound up stacked on the bed -- in an unstable way. Last night while I slept they all slid off and banged down the neat stacks of magazines, books and envelopes. The side trays for my table were slippery enough to lead the way, thankfully they did not break.

One of the drawer units is broken, though not from that crash because all eight of those were stacked in the chair. I don't know how that happened, I didn't even unwrap those till later today, so I sent a customer service email to Blick asking for a replacement part. The only table parts that wound up in that mess were the ones that were on the bed.

Right now I am taking a break in the middle of Some Assembly Required. My new Alvin Craftmaster II drafting table has a base. I have constructed the base using the little tools in the parts packet and it's solid. The Allen wrench had enough leverage for me to get the bolts in good and tight.

 Yesterday the packages arrived. I was having a bad morning, so I crawled into my regular chair and looked at the doorway -- and saw the big brown box. Wow! The taboret arrived. I knew the taboret would arrive. It's beautiful, it's the Americana taboret from Studio Designs and I got it on Clearance from Blick when I got fed up with not having places to put things displaced in my Spring Cleaning.

It was scheduled to arrive on the tenth. But the box looked funny. It was too tall and flat. I quailed at the thought of having to assemble the taboret and wondered if I even had to assemble the drawers -- I thought it'd be easy.

The table shipped on the 9th from the factory. I wasn't expecting it for another week, but that was the box I first saw when I got up in the morning. The taboret was in another, shorter, fatter box very neatly packed in with lots of styrofoam sheets and corner protectors. It came through perfect except that I gave it a ding on a corner getting it into my room.

This was major exertion for me. I did it mostly by tilting it and pressing with my legs, since my fibromyalgia has reduced my strength to something pathetic and right side hemi-hypoplasia makes mere walking something that takes five times the body energy it does for any symmetrical person. I get chronic fatigue in two directions -- and spent most of my life believing I was just lazy and depressed. The "depressed" came from pain levels that I wasn't even aware were different from other people's. I thought anyone who got stressed got racked with spasms and physical waves of pain that took days to go away.

So as I describe all this, remember I'm doing everything cockeyed and weird, compensating for not being able to just lift or push things the way other people would. And that bending over more than once will start throwing my scoliotic back and bad hip.

The knobs were neatly screwed in backwards inside the drawers so as to save space in shipping, so I reversed them and put them on right. Happy day! I had drawers! I took a long break for several hours in the middle of chaos and screwed on the casters. Turned it upright.

Wow. I had half the assembly done. I was so proud!

 That was where I started getting a bit brainless. Filled with macho energy and confidence at having attached four casters to a small wooden piece of furniture, I got the brilliant idea that I should move the end table my printer sits on and put the taboret where it normally sat. After all, the taboret was narrower and would give a few inches more room for the glorious Alvin Craftmaster II drafting table.

So I took off the entire assortment of stuff in front of the printer and found temporary places for ashtray, coffee cup, sweetener container, Pitt artist pens, water jar for watercolors, child's ruler, et many cetera scattered into the pile of other clutter on my right side table.

I stupidly picked up the end table and carried it across the room dodging the meter square stack of books and clutter, moved two large portfolios and put it next to the bed.

I went over to the small shelving unit that used to sit next to the door and pulled all the books out. This involved many trips bending over to pull books out of shelves that were double stacked and carrying them across the room to stack them on the bed. It took three tries with hour-long rests in between just to empty that.

My son in law got up from his nap and helped move the gold armchair in and the broken armchair out at that point. I put a strip of thin bubble wrap over the end table to protect the finish and put the short shelving unit on top of the table. Aha. The shelves will be easier to get at when I reshelve those books.

This became the seed of chaos when all those books on the end of the waterbed started bouncing around when I got into my full wave waterbed last night.

My son in law got the table unpacked. I carried all the parts into my room and closed the baby gate. I called it a night -- my hip went out, my back was spasming, I was exhausted and felt like I could sleep for a week except that the pain kept me awake.

So I sat like a dummy playing Diablo 2 for several hours resting, until I got bored with that and did my daily art sketch. I might as well include yesterday's art too. I have been keeping up daily art throughout March -- last night it was a major effort to do anything. But I used oil pastels and my smallest sketchbook, the 4" x 6" one so that I wouldn't get too detailed or elaborate. Even a sketch or small study does count for my Daily Art challenge.

A lifetime of believing I was lazy and trying to fight that laziness in order to do the things I wanted to do in life and keep up with people who have a full set of human abilities left me with way too much willpower and too little sense. Of course I stopped and rested. Of course than feverish drive to get things done and keep up with things regardless of health issues cut in.

I pushed myself hard to do that little sketch, started with a wobbly circle to represent an apple, looked at the sketch I was copying and decided I didn't like the other bloke's apple. So I drew one of the apples from our yard from memory and added a grapefruit behind it because I could remember the look of grapefruits vividly. I hate eating them without an inch of sugar on top and at least half a dozen maraschino cherries, so eating grapefruits at breakfast was one of the small tortures of my unlivable childhood.

As an adult with an unlimited supply of cherries and sugar just for the choices when grocery shopping, I got to enjoying them as long as I only had them once or twice a year -- they still aren't something I'd eat every day. So I remembered a good one, the Ruby Red kind with the blush, and beat down the flashbacks that all the back spasms and leg cramps were giving me. Childhood when everyone believed I could run, play games, hit balls, stand up straight and do all the things other children could do like make it from one classroom to the next between bells was a consistent horror. The only mitigating thing in my entire childhood was that in art classes no one bugged me to do anything else and I'd get high grades for just goofing around with art supplies.

I remembered times that my room got messy and then worse when someone came in screaming at me at two in the morning for how filthy it was and tore everything up and threw it around the room, destroying my stuff. I get flashbacks about those midnight raids to this day. I can keep my mind off it while I'm awake but when I get tired or the pain runs too high, it's hard not to remember the time in my life when everything was like that and all my schedules were set by people who had expectations way beyond what I could physically do.

So after doing the art, I goofed around blogging it and then got started writing an article for my site on Drawing from Memory. By the time that was done and posted and linked properly to the index page on Creativity Articles, it was a quarter to four in the morning and I had not lifted a finger on the continued assembly of the table.

So I slept till around eleven, woke up with my cat on my chest purring at me and asking for food while the sun stabbed my eyes. I got up and saw the chaos from the first photo. Ow ow ow. It was bad. Really bad.

I sat still for about three hours doing other things online and then started the assembly. Right now, the base of the table is constructed and I did, thanks to the Allen wrench, manage to get all the bolts in good and tight to where I'd need some help undoing them.

So I went back to the computer for another physical rest and wrote this Hub. Once it is all done, when the table is constructed and the chair moved over to it and all the books shelved if not organized and sorted, It's not that I work in my bedroom. It's that my room is an art studio that happens to also have a bed in it... and that works better for me when crossing the room too many times can throw my back.

I'm going to pay for this in bed rest but it will be worth it when it's done.

I keep telling myself that...

 Today, this afternoon, though I was starting to fall over from chronic fatigue, I did it. I managed to get the table completely assembled.

It took four more spurts of action followed by rests to finish it. The third also took my son in law Karl's help pushing on the side of the base with his foot so that the bolts holding the ratchet mechanism to the tabletop lined up -- it apparently got a little distorted during transit and was about 3/8" off between the holes in the ratchet mechanism's attachment plate and the premounted threaded sockets the bolts screw into.

He also helped me turn it right side up after we got that done. Then I rested, got up again and put together the drawer units, snapped the sides onto the top and it's done. It is beautiful. It is inviting.

I feel like I could sleep for a week.

 This is not the finish for my 2009 Spring Clearing. My bed still has a lot of books piled up on the end, the meter-square stack of stuff still needs sorting and putting away, and the laundry basket of random stuff needs to be gone through and sorted too.

It is the end of the hardest part though. I can take my time with slowly moving my stuff over there into the new pristine studio area and that big empty table. It reminds me of the Serengeti or something, it's all vast unexplored territory brimming with possibilities.

I got this far, the rest of it will come into order as it does. I edited out the comment that I'd write a third in this series because I decided to add this last section to Part II -- but I might do a short one on the Sorting of the Books and final organization of all the loose stuff.

Now that there are good places to put a lot of these things, it might go a whole lot better!