Unfuck Your Habitat

rohise:

My cats taught me a UFYH lesson today. Daughter shut boy cat in the kitchen when she went to school, because she was loaded down with too many things to carry, and he likes to door rush in hopes of escaping (for what? we don’t know, he immediately sits outside and cries to be let back in, but she didn’t have time to deal with it either way, and I was in the shower).

Unfortunately, I did a bad bad thing, and left dishes on the bench last night. The bench right above the completely empty dishwasher, and right under the hooks holding the big heavy frying pans. Kitty doesn’t usually climb on the bench, let alone up the shelving above them, but what’s a critter to do when shut in the kitchen for 15 whole minutes? Why get up to mischief, that’s what.

Total body count, 2 black stoneware bowls, a bottle of hp sauce (and wow, that was hard to get up off the wood floors!) and my wee bodum 1 cup cafétiere, which I LOOOOVed and my daughter got for my birthday a few years ago. And a huge dent in the cast iron frying pan that he knocked down onto said broken items (pretty sure a panelbeater friend can hammer that out, but I’ll very likely have to strip and reseason the pan after. Yay.) And a cat who now knows he can climb the shelving to sit on top of the pantry right up under the ceiling. Again, yay.

Lesson learnt, well and good: Do my damn dishes at night, particularly when “doing dishes” means “putting dishes in the empty dishwasher which exists for exactly that purpose.”

ashbethabitat:

One reason I love UFYH is that it’s explicitly intended to be accessible by people with different physical and mental health capabilities (THANK YOU FOR THAT, SO MANY TIMES OVER!), and while my house is by no means entirely unfucked, due to a nightmare move + major health issues this year, I have found a few ways to do household chores that had become more and more difficult as time went on/various injuries accumulated.

(I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective-tissue disorder, and the TL;DR version of what that means is that I get hurt easily, I heal slowly, my joints and spine are hypermobile, and I have a growing collection of permanent soft-tissue injuries, along with the bonus super-fun double-punch of trigeminal neuralgia and chronic migraines, common in EDSers. You could think of me as someone with a bad back, bad knees, bad shoulder — you get the idea.)

I’ve recently found a couple of tricks that are really helping me maintain, even when my back is fucked or when I’m having trouble getting up/down off the ground. The three tasks that I identified as most difficult AND most likely to cause injury (in this case, they had a high likelihood of throwing my back out) were scooping the catboxes, loading and unloading the dishwasher, and loading and unloading the (floor-level, front-loading) washer and dryer. All of these required either sitting on the floor or bending way over and reaching forward, and they were hurting me all too often.

I bought an appropriately-sized Ikea tabletop from the options here(59”x29.5”, for my space, and I chose the “Vika Amon” style):

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/workspaces/11844/

I then bought the *adjustable* (this part is crucial!) Vika Kaj style legs, which have a minimum height of about 2 feet off the ground.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60105301/

And then I bought a Torbjörn adjustable office chair (I wouldn’t use this to sit in for long, but that’s not what it’s for — it’s crucially light, easy to move, has swiveling wheels, and *it adjusts down to about two feet off the ground.)

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50224757/

You may see where I’m going with this — the litterboxes went up on the assembled table (with a temporary intermediate step in between for my elderly chubby cat who doesn’t like to jump — will be looking for a more permanent cat-stairs arrangement in future), I can wheel the chair up to the table, level with the litterboxes, and scoop away to my heart’s content. (Okay — to the CATS’ hearts’ content, to be fair.)

The “scooty-chair,” as I have so dubbed it, is also immensely helpful in loading/unloading the dishwasher, and it even fits into my closet-sized laundry room in order to let me load and unload the washer without wrecking myself.

I’m really pleased, because it means that I have to rely on my (non-live-in) partner for fewer things, and it also means that I feel more independent and can unfuck these portions of my house without worrying that half the time I’ll wind up hurting myself in the process! :D

BTW, I can usually be found at http://ashbet.tumblr.com/ :)

Excellent ideas! Thanks for passing them along!

in-the-sweet-hereafter:

Last night I spent 45 minutes steam-cleaning the downstairs carpet.

At five o’clock this morning, I woke up to the chilling and unmistakable sound of a cat vomiting somewhere in the general vicinity of downstairs.

NOOOOO PLEASE BABY JESUS DON’T LET IT BE ON THE CLEAN CARPET, I thought. And it wasn’t on the clean  carpet…but it was right next to it, on the edge of the lowermost carpeted stair tread. He must have stood on the tile and hurled vertically onto the step. Thanks a lot, cat.

After that setback, I wasn’t in the mood for much unfuckening tonight, but I did clear off my bedside table.

Before: lots of random stuff, including books, DVDs, nail polish, origami, a Halloween mask and a hairbrush.

After: nothing but the lamp, my Kindle, and the coaster for my water glass.

I also made a pot of tofu noodle soup, which was delicious, if I do say so myself. And I remembered to clean up as I went, so there’s not a giant mess in the kitchen and I can start the dishwasher before bed. 

Mmmmm, soup.

theextraandtheordinary:

So I’ve been very slowly picking away at this for a week or so now. A little here, a little there.  It’s one of those rooms that I always want to do…

Okay, first of all, my room does not usually look this bad. I was in the middle of trying to sort some things out in my closet when I realized I should have taken a before photo of my room. Usually there are sheets on my bed.  Admittedly usually the clothes on the bed are on the floor ;)

But (!) Check THIS out:

The first thing I did was take the hated mirrored closet doors off. I’ve been wanting to do that since I moved in last September. I’ve had the curtains to hang in their place since about December. I’m not totally happy with A) the fact I didn’t iron them before hanging them and B) the spring rod situation, but yay for no more horrid mirrored doors. Figure I can iron them out when I replace the rod.

And behind the curtains?

Okay, clearly I need to go through and get rid of some stuff because the amount of clothing in there is ridiculous but I’m in a place right now where I need to hang on to a range of sizes. I did weed out the things that are too big (save for a block of t-shirts I like to walk in). But! The t-shirt thing is new, the shoe rack is new, that shelf with all those handbags (and yes, that shelf is 95% ALL handbags… some ladies have a shoe problem, I have a t-shirt, handbag, hat problem) is all pretty and organized (larger bags I use for beach/concert/farmer’s market/day trips, etc. are in an organizer in my office closet). I bought all those organizers forever ago at the Container Store (um, hello wonderful place!), it was nice to use them finally.

As for the rest of the room?  It’s VERY girlie, which surprises a lot of my friends, but I do love it so….

I love my awesome glass tray table. I bought it at a barn sale years ago. You’re really supposed to use it for serving as the glass top doubles as a tray. I use it to rotate out postcards I love/have received. I’m also sort of a post-card whore.

Okay, the cat-trees aren’t the prettiest, but clearly the kitties enjoy them.

So there it is. Completely unfucked, totally organized, so incredibly clean and tidy. And I’m absolutely going to keep it that way.  Sheesh! I even steam-cleaned the carpet!