It has been a crazy weekend.
We've been seeing mice in the apartment for over a week. We couldn't find the holes where they were coming in, and the traps our super gave us stayed empty. My wife saw them go around the traps a few times. Management finally got us an exterminator Friday night.
My last post in this thread was a recognition of how far we've come. Well...it's quite the wake up call when the exterminator has to pull everything out to access the walls. Closets, on top of the fridge, some of the shelves, things that were stacked on the floor (I know, I know)...yikes. It looked like a bomb went off by the time he left, and it made me want to burn everything I own. But he did find and seal a few holes and set some traps in better locations. KNOCK ON WOOD, we haven't seen a mouse or evidence of a mouse since.
As if that wasn't enough, we had a long-scheduled delivery of a new bookcase set up for Saturday morning. We ordered it a month ago for my wife's books. The old one was falling apart and too small for the space. Before, books were stacked on top and next to it. We (I?) wanted them all to fit nicely on one bookshelf. So as soon as the exterminator left, we had to empty the old shelves onto the living room floor.
The blessing in disguise is that it was a bit of a wake up call for my wife, too. She will never be a minimalist or anything, and still rolls her eyes if I mention Marie Kondo. But as we spent all day Saturday and part of the day Sunday recovering the apartment, she managed to get rid of a lot of stuff. We ended up with three bags of goodwill stuff, 5+ bags of trash, and more to come as she sorts some papers that will go into memory boxes.
My goal this whole time was to end up with an apartment with clear floors/surfaces that was easy to clean. I was starting to become okay with a clear floor meaning that stuff was only on the very edges/in corners/etc. because of the volume of stuff. But it's still not easy to clean, then, is it? It's crazy that we can't access many of the baseboards.
I'm really grateful she's finally taking the initiative to go through her stuff. She's not being as ruthless as I'd like, but at this point it's better than nothing. We have plans to go to the container store this week (we have some gift cards) and get some boxes and bins. No more piles on the floor like that. If we're gonna have too much stuff, I want it to at least be easily moveable.
At least our small room with the new bookcase looks great now. We both love it.