I actually got something done this week - last Saturday when we got home I ended up dealing with the porch. We have a small enclosed entryway to our kitchen door which in the most technical sense is our “porch”. It is aluminum with screens on the top half of the walls. It has a shelving unit with cabinet doors on the bottom of it on the wall between the door to the outside (facing the street) and the door to the kitchen. On the back wall there is my husband’s boyhood work bench. This has a shelf under it the top which holds a box for recycling of cans and bottles - just stick my hand out the kitchen door and toss in and I stack the newspapers on top of it for same. There is a small garbage pail between the house wall and the table where I toss the soda bottles for return for deposit. It also has some other storage items. The rest of the porch is filled with stuff. There is a narrow pathway from the door to door.
What is in it which takes up so much more of the space? Well, I tossed the plastic chair which was in the far corner years ago so that’s gone. I admit that much of this mess is mine. I keep empty cardboard boxes to use to put out the recycling. Our township gave out special green plastic square boxes to put the recycling in (cans and bottles) when the program first started. When we bought the house the box came with it. I would dutifully put it out with our cans and bottles weekly and put the newspapers, tied in a stack (sometimes two stacks or more if I had been clearing out papers or it had been raining heavily or snowing the week before) either next to it or in it every week. If we have a lot of snow it is a problem putting it out as where it goes cannot be reached if there is mounds of snow - sometimes I will leave it in our driveway cut, sometimes I hold onto it for the next week. Nice and easy.
I am pretty sure that I mentioned that we live on a main, 4 lane road. The sanitation workers did not neatly place the box back where it belonged on our property, they would drop it in the road. Cars would hit it. Eventually it was in pretty bad shape - even taped back together and it disappeared - my assumption being that the sanitation workers took it. I called the department and they told me to come and pick up a new one. So I drove down - about half an hour each way - to get a new box. In the interim they had made the box larger. The new box did not fit in the work bench. Big problem - it did not fit anywhere usable and we could not figure out what to do with it. Shortly after my sister-in-law was selling her late mother’s house and I had an idea. My in-laws never believed in recycling so they had their box as originally given to them sitting in the garage. I took my large one and exchanged it for their smaller one. Worked well for us and the people in the house would probably have children and need the larger box anyway. Well at some time since this box also was destroyed by being thrown in the street and disappeared I had to come up with a new idea. (In the interim the sanitation department had dropped off the new, even larger, full garbage can sized recycling can which sits tossed behind the garage ever since as it would hold 2 months of our cans and bottles. What really annoyed me about them leaving this can was it was left on the driveway, in front of the house - if only they did that with the boxes when I was using them - at the start of July that year - when people like us are away and it stands there as beacon that the house is empty.)
My solution has been to use cardboard boxes that come into the house to hold the recycling. The box itself is recyclable so they just take it all. To do this I hold onto cardboard boxes as we get them - small ones such as cereal boxes are good when I just have 4 soup cans and so on up to larger size boxes which can take a couple (few?) weeks worth when I have not have not been able to put out the recycling. (Really big ones can be cut in half to use for 2 weeks.) They were all just tossed and a mess.
I have not had a chance to return soda bottles and cans since doing so at the start of December. Weather, things that needed to be done, etc. after my embroidery guild meeting had stopped me from me from doing so. I had 3 large clear garbage bags with same floating about the porch.
There are also several large spray bottles for poison ivy, killing weeds, etc. floating on the floor of the porch. A couple of them are empty - but we were not sure how to dispose of them as they are “hazardous substances” and cannot go in the garbage. (Since clearing the porch out a bit last weekend I have checked and they can only be returned at “STOP” events (stop throwing out poisons). So we have to make a note and get out early enough to get to one - hopefully the July one as the June one is not near us and the July one is.
Using a small plastic bag I was going to throw out I moved these into the far corner of the porch after I cleared out a full large garbage bag that was sitting there, I then put the plastic bags of soda bottles behind the bottles so both are out of the way. The cardboard boxes which were kept were put on top of the same bags. We had a large garbage bag in the middle of the porch to toss, well, garbage into. That was moved further into this corner.
We have a short office paper sized garbage pail in the porch. I put our spare, sealed bag of snow salt in it and then put the started bag on top of it. (The other spare bags are in the snow blower shed outside this porch.)
We have a kitchen sized garbage pail in the porch which holds some of the assorted, brooms and shovels in the porch - I added some more of the lighter weight ones into it. The three snow shovels should go into that same shed until next winter.
Well, the porch is not really cleared out (I did not go through the large shelving unit, but much, if not all, of what is on the open shelf areas is needed and I did fell like going into the doored section - especially since I had not intended to do any of this) but it is so much better. We can easily walk through it.
The garbage bags were put out by the garbage pail that actually holds garbage outside the house - next to the snowblower shed. Garbage pick up would be Monday and it could not go out to the curb before Sunday night. I had 2 large black bags of garbage and a smaller white kitchen can sized one also. I also had two relatively small filled bags with pieces of our driveway in them. (One area of our driveway is falling apart and we can keep picking up the pieces as we are afraid that in winter if we use the snow blower it will send the pieces flying.) So I put those two bags out also. Sunday night when I put all this at the curb I also added the usual kitchen garbage bag.
I am also taking smaller bags of the soda bottles - one put in the car as one bag of bottles is returned to get them rid of them in small amounts. Husband hates the entire process (see the comment about his family not recycling in the body of this post) and I had been saving them up to take monthly. This has become a problem this year and I would not have a chance to do so again until September. I plan to get rid of the bottles a small bag at a time. Once we are caught up the same bag or less will be returned weekly.
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK -
Sometimes when one never has time to do something, it suddenly becomes “oh carp, we have to do this NOW.” If that happens do what needs to be done. If you can prevent yourself from reaching that point - do it before it reaches that point. Oh, and of course, the snow shovels still have not been put into the snow blower shed.
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