Yeah so I wrote the original post and then did nothing on the attic for weeks. In my defense, I’ve been wrangling puppies nonstop since July of last year, and keeping them from destroying the second floor is a full-time job. We are finally “down” to four puppies (one 10 months old and three who are 4 months old) and the weather is good, so it’s time to get back to Craphoming.

There is so much to do and some of it is far more important than the attic, but the fact that I haven’t even swept up in there since November of 2015 is really bringing me down. So I decided to start there.

Y’all.

I was up there for two hours today and only got a third of it done.  Two. Hours.

And that’s just the initial sweep, it doesn’t include vaccuming up any debris that fell in the cracks between the floorboards or the two or three rounds of mopping we’re going to need to do. The ‘before’ pictures don’t do justice to how horrifying it is up there. The roofing debris is up to four inches thick, and it isn’t less than a full quarter inch thick anywhere on the floor. We also have a bunch of moving boxes and some random household mess that we chucked up there a few years back during the winter. That was when the city didn’t do bulk pick-up year-round and we were trying to make some progress in January…that stuff didn’t fit in our regular trash can, so it had to go somewhere.

I cleared a space near the west window and then moved a bunch of boxes and trash along that wall, and swept up a couple of large bags’ worth of roofing debris.

Two hours.

The puppies broke my camera – brats – so I don’t have a photo of the current progress. The picture I selected for this post shows far more trash bags than I managed to fill today. I’ll probably have that many bags just of roofing debris once I’m done.  I will be picking up a new camera in a couple of weeks, and will take photos of the state of the attic once I have it.

I’m disappointed that it took so long to do such a (relatively) small space, particularly since I started in a section that’s less of a mess than the rest. At this rate it’s going to take another five hours just to sweep up the rest of the roofing debris and to pull out the rest of our moving boxes and other junk that’s up there. Spring is the worst season for my porphyria, so my energy level is not fantastic right now. But we have a lot of work to do this year (I haven’t even told y’all about most of it), and before we start the real work I would like to get the goddamned attic swept already.

I did take some measurements, and we’ll need to pick up 30 rolls of insulation to do the entire attic. Well, 28…but I want to have a couple extra on hand in case I screw anything up.

Stay tuned for updates. They’ll be a little slow, but they are coming.