Luke and Mike and Steven's old bedroom

Luke has straight A's in school! Yay, he never cared much about grades before, so this is the first year he has put any effort into it. Not much effort, by the way, but at least some. He is in 11th grade and realizes his grades are now important if he wants to get into a decent college or into a co-op program.

Last weekend when we were cleaning Steven's room (more on that later), Mike found a bottle rocket. He went downstairs to take out some of the tons of garbage that we found in the room and lit the bottle rocket. We had the window in the bedroom wide open to try to eliminate some of the stench, and it scared us out of the heck! Mike ran in the house after he did that and yelled out, in a mad, disgusted Dad voice, "Steveeeeeeeen!"

Oh, the bedroom, ugh! It was horrendously disgusting. That is all I can say. I was going to take before and after pictures, but it was too beyond gross, even for pictures. Suffice it to say that we took bag after bag of smelly garbage out of there. The work crew was not very cooperative, so the going was slow. Shauna was a great help because she is anxious to get into her new room. The rest of the crew, including Mike, was spotty and sporadic, at best. I had a real problem with people leaving the room to take something elsewhere and never returning! At worst, they were complaining about the smell and the cat hair and the general disgustingness of the job. Okay, so no one liked it, but we still had to do it, but I had trouble convincing them of that. Blogger is telling me that disgustingness isn't a word, but it fits this situation, so I'm going to ignore that! We got most of the trash out and Mike got most of the carpet ripped up and Shauna spent hours sweeping and pulling out carpet staples. Of course, her handyman father gave her a needle-nosed wire cutter instead of a pliers to pull them out, so she was having a horrible time until I (the hero of the story!) supplied her with the right equipment!