Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Organization & anger management

I decided it was time to finally clean out the closet in the master bathroom.

After all, I have already cleaned out the oil & vinegar cupboard, the pantry, the fridge & the freezer. The junk room needs cleaned but is a multi day project.

Mostly though Havoc had a wart & I knew I bought some Compound W in the past year but couldn’t find it in the closet.

No clue why.

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The plan was to empty all the shelves, slide out the bottom one, slide in a plastic drawer unit, throw out the expired stuff & restock the drawers & the shelves.

Sounds straightforward right?

And in anyone else’s house probably it would have been.  But this house was built by stoners.

This is the underside of one of the shelves

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A sliding bracket. Clever. Keeps the shelf from being accidentally bumped out of place & provides support for the whole shelf.

Except…

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Yep. The door frame blocks the end of the shelf slide, so you cannot actually remove the shelves AT ALL.

Unless you take apart the door frame. Or saw off the bracket.

Oh goody! Power tools

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Except…

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Hellz. No batteries.

Oh well. We’ll go old school

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Except I have to saw UPWARD while semi squatting because the shelf is the wrong height to kneel or stand & if I bend over I can’t see what I am doing.

You know what? Screw this careful spot sawing nonsense.

What I need is one of these.

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A mallet. Goodness knows I have enough rage & frustration built up to knock the hell out of dozen shelves.

(know what’s fun? Calling your husband up at work and saying Where can I find a jigsaw & a mallet” and then counting the seconds of the pause before he says “Do I want to know why?”)

Know what is even more fun?

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Take that you freakish stoner installed pain in the ass shelves.

Found this on the floor. Maybe it is a hint.

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So with the shelf gone I was able to slide the the drawers & restock the shelves.

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Now I realize the fun part of these posts for everyone is seeing just how old the stuff is. Sadly I have no photos because mostly it was prescription stuff and the editing required to block out all the identifying details was more than I cared to tackle. Or it was that white on white imprinting that requires even more editing to be visible in a photo.  But let me just say the pantry & fridge have NOTHING on the medicine closet. The oldest thing in this closet was a bottle of prescription pain killers from when I had my gall bladder out in March 2004. There was a bunch of stuff that expired in 2007 and another group of things that expired in 2010.

In this house we dig around on the shelves, find the box or bottle of meds we want, look at the expiration date (hopefully), see it expired in 2008, put it back on the shelf & go buy some new stuff. We don’t throw it away immediately because there are small kids in the house & while they have never gone digging through the garbage & helped themselves to expired meds, it COULD happen. We can’t flush it because of the septic tank. So we leave it on the shelf, intending to throw it out on garbage day or adding it to the used kitty litter when we clean the cat box.

Yeah, like THAT’S going to happen.

The boxes & bottles pile up, get pushed around, deceive us into thinking we have 5 boxes of cold medicine & make it impossible to find the Compound W.

Thus leading to shelf rage.

Clean out your medicine closets. The shelf you save might be your own.

7 comments:

Alison said...

Oh Stacey...I can relate...and we don't have the excuse of young children finding it if we throw it away!
Alison xx

Rinda1961 said...

LOL!!! I would have given up on the drawer unit. Your house is such a jigsaw puzzle. I often stare at medicine and ask. . . if it's only been expired for 6 months, should I take two to get the right amount of potency?
Rinda

Beverly said...

LOL Frustrating process but didn't it feel oh so good when the job was done? :)  The Chosen One works for a pharmaceutical company so this one issue I don't have to deal with.

Jemma Sharrock said...

LOL at your husband's response!  A good bit of decluttering achieved (eventually) - I think I may have a quick root through our cabinet for today's decluttering though I doubt anything will be as old as yours as I think I sorted it out a year or 5 ago. 

Cheri Andrews said...

You truly made me chuckle with "the shelf you save may be your own" comment.  I'm never sure that the expiration dates on medicine are real and not just there to get you to buy more, so I tend to keep and use stuff up to a year past expiration. (admittedly not on young children).  And I would so love to give DH a call asking for the location of serious power tools.

SciFi Dad said...

I always tell my wife, if you don't know where it is, you probably shouldn't be using it.

Carole said...

It's scary how fast they seem to go out of date, isn't it? I must go through my bathroom cupboard again. I'll bet I've got a few things in there that need to be disposed of.