At 9:20 PM on Sunday January 20, 2013, I texted my lady friend "Queen's Room ready for Succession." She was out for an inspection by 11:20 AM on the next day and was pleasantly surprised at how cleaned out it is now. (She decided to leave the slippers I bought as a gift on the table. She likes the table and lamp and intends to use them when she moves in. Whenever that is--she doesn't know. In the meantime we plan to make a number of changes to the room.)
Being able to clear out this room for my friend (or others) to sleep in was the #1 reason for building Lyndhurst. This room hasn't been this well cleaned out since I bought the house in 1992, when it became my mother's bedroom. When I returned from San Francisco in 1997 after the death of my mother, it got used as a storage room for old heavy tube-based electronic laboratory equipment. I made a previous effort to clear out the room in May 2009 for my friend. That time I simply moved junk temporarily into the Garage, with the plan that I'd build a backyard storage building real-soon-now, though the heavy electronics equipment got recycled at a paid recycler (I paid a fee based on weight, which came to $200 or so). Even then, I hadn't really moved everything out, it was a cheat, I left stuff in the closet and under the bed. When it was clear my friend wasn't moving in soon anyway, the junk quickly made its way back into the room so I could resume parking my car in the garage.
Fortunately the weekend of January 19 and 20 was a very pleasant weekend, with highs in the upper 60's, for moving stuff out to Lyndhurst. It wasn't necessary to move much more stuff, given what I had already accomplished in previous weeks, but stuff did need to be moved, and I organized the stuff in Lyndhurst better so it now almost appears like a useable room. Lyndhurst is beginning to get the appearance inside of a basement room. The big thing moved on Saturday was the large bookcase-like cabinet for holding video and audio cassettes. In so doing, I also sorted the cassettes leaving a certain class for inside-home-only (I'm still considering Lyndhurst one notch less environmentally stable for long term storage than my home, but it could actually be the reverse at this point) and replacing them with others in hallway cabinets to go out.
I also moved out the antique table, which had been positioned in the Queen's Room as a bedside table, but clearly wasn't a good bedside table being about a foot higher than the bed.
There were also boxes packed last week sitting in hallway and living room that needed moving out. Two more large plastic bins were packed, one with stuff mainly from the bed and table, including CD-R's of me playing my Kurzweil synthesizer, and one filled mainly with hangers from the closet. I cleared out the Queen's closet on Sunday by moving most clothes and ordinary spare plastic hangers to the King's Room and Laboratory closets. That left special hangers of various kinds, and metal hangers, and they went into this box (which is currently in the Living Room actually, as by the time I finished packing it was 8pm on Sunday and I didn't want to go outside in the sub-60 temperature, and I haven't been moved to move it since, having time constraints ever since then.
One of the biggest ordeals in my mind was clearing the desk table, but actually the papers there were quickly placed into a new folder if they related to home improvements or the construction of Lyndhurst. That job was done in less than an hour on Sunday night, and then the room was vacuumed, leading up to the 9:20 completion.
At this point the items left in the room can be numbered. I've left the bed, which is perfectly useable, with minimal bedding including two pillows and a blanket. They've been there all along, the sheets were probably last changed on this bed in the early 2000's, or possibly when I prepared it for friend usage (but nothing like now) in 2009. My friend wants to bring her bed and mattress with her when she actually moves over, but nevertheless wants me to clean the bedding that's on the temporary bed now.
I left the desk with a desk lamp on top. My friend likes the desk a lot, so it is going to stay. It is a nicely made wood computer desk. I can't remember exactly what she said about the lamp but she liked it too.
I left two artworks, a large meadow picture above the bed and another tiny meadow picture painted on a small wood piece, now hanging on the side wall. My friend liked both of those. Many other pictures were removed, including especially the Flapper Picture which was for my mom. It was actually a framed copy of The Ladies Home Journal from September 1915, the month in which my mother was born. It was treasured by my mother but wasn't particularly pretty or meaningful to anyone else. It got repacked in the cardboard box that a new A/C intake grille was packed in. That box with grill was another thing needing to be removed from the Queen's Room. Removing the grill from its shipping box (it was placed in front of A/C intake but not actually attached to wall yet) and repacking the picture into that box was one of the bigger accomplishments of Sunday. Another was chipping the small plastic edges off the bottom of a marble cutting block that had been stored in the Queen's room. I did that chipping in the driveway, during which a pretty neighbor lady walked by and said hello. I needed to do that chipping because previously every time I tried even to move that piece of marble (which I put underneath hifi components to lift them off the carpet generally and that was why I bought it) I cut my fingers on the edges of plastic underneath which had originally glued the long-since-removed feet from the base. Once the marble was fully smoothed underneath, I simply carried it to Lyndhurst. It had been stored out-of-the-way in the Queens Room for years simply so I wouldn't have to handle it and get my fingers cut again.
I left the antique white lamp on the floor plugged into the switched outlet. Since the antique table it used to sit on had been removed, there was no alternative but put this lamp on the floor for now. It will eventually be replaced by a floor standing lamp with arms.
The only remaining wall hanging is a mirror. My friend didn't like it, so it will go. It looks like an antique mirror but on close inspection the fancy carving is just moulded plastic. So it is made of moulded plastic laminated on top of real wood. So the mirror is a fake antique mirror, but now so old (probably from the 40's or 50's) that it is itself antique. Still, fake things like this generally have little value. I can't remember seeing this mirror in any previous family residence. I think my mother picked it up at Goodwill. To Goodwill it will be returned.
And I have left the vacuum and stepstool in the room. Though I have vacuumed the floor, I haven't actually vacuumed all the way under the bed, and the stool is nice for reaching in the closet to remove the shelf hardware. But those are really just excuses, I'm just keeping the vacuum and stepstool in this room because the garage room, the Gymnasium, is not ready for it yet.
And that's all there is now. In case you forgot how it looked before, even after a week of clearing out, it had looked like this:
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