A tonne of fun

Over the week off J and I decided to tackle a part of the house that's been bugging us since we moved in - it's full of junk!
I'd like to clarify that it's not our junk. OK, we had an old couch and a few bags of leaves but the rest was all "gifted". We got the house for very cheap from family, and one of the conditions was that they could leave behind whatever they didn't want and we could "keep" it...like a sort of gift...only unwanted...and mostly unusable. And worst of all - it took up so much space.
Needless to say, at first we didn't mind, as we had so much painting and fixing up to do (again part of the deal) that we didn't even notice much. Now that we're getting well into the fixing uppy painting and such, we've started to curse all the junk when it gets in our way and thwarts our plans. Our 4th level was full to the brim with useless crap and we finally decided to do something about it. After a dissapointing call to 1-800-got-junk (they wanted a retarded amount to take it all away) we rented a 17 ft UHaul and filled it to the brim with junk. Yard junk, shed junk, deck stuff, basement junk, delapidated old useless nicknacks and no less than two non-working barbecues. You name it, it went. We even broke down and shed all our boxes and packaging from our appliances and electronics (we both had every box for everything we ever bought...we both are anal about that kind of thing) and recycled them. That hurt a bit but we figured we might as well do it all. The fact that none of that went into the UHaul but to recycling was even more surprising to us, when we finally realised just how much junk we had.
The result of our plans was a whole day of me carting crap out into our back yard, sorting it and then J and a friend helping me load it into the truck when he got off work that afternoon. Thursday morning we were off to the city dump. The result - we officially removed over a literal tonne of garbage from our house. Yes, I have the city dump weighbill to prove it - 1030 Kg of junk (I also learned that a 17 ft UHaul weighs just over 3 tonnes empty, should anyone care...)

Now we actually have way more space downstairs...for a craft/stained glass area, tool/workbench, laundry and actually organizing and storing stuff on the shelves down there. We can also prime and paint our screened in deck finally and hopefully get some lights out there. I want to take an old table and cover it in tiles for out there, move our barbecue (it works!), make a rack for the bikes and have friends come over and help us paint murals on the walls and an old style map compass on the floor to make it "ours". We even took in my window I made for the back door to be placed between low E glass so my Dad can put it in our door. I can finally clean up the yard and clear out and use the firepit (never knew it was there under all the old yard waste and junk behind the shed!!) and we even have a functional playhouse in the backyard (with toys) for our friends and family with kids...AND I can plant some flowers in the yard too because we actually went and got the yard tools and things we've needed for so long to help keep up the yard.

It is so exciting. The junk phase was step one in a list of elaborate plans that can now be started.
We're both procrastinators so it'll be amusing to see how far we get on all these things, but if I can get to it, there'll be no stopping me!