Cellar Duty

No pictures this time.  Sorry.  I arrived at the house today after work and Dad was already hard at it.  Well, actually I had to wait for him a bit because he was on the way back from his second trip to the dump.  He had been gathering up all the canned goods in the cellar and disposing of them at the dump in New Market.  A third trip would be needed.  Why, you may ask?  Due to the fact that apparently this family NEVER throws anything away.  The cellar is a true testament to this fact.  I promise I'll add a picture next time, but let me try to paint one with words:  The cellar is unfinished and made of dirt.  Lots of dirt.  Dirt on the floor, dirt on the walls, and most importantly, a huge pile of dirt that goes practically to the baseboards underneath the bedroom, half the kitchen, and a wee little bit of the living room.  At one point, ambitious inhabitants of my future homestead decided they wanted a fully dug out space that goes the width and length of the house cellar.  Their ambition apparently had limits.  The dug out enough to give some space and stopped, but not before adding cinder block half walls to boost the foundation from the excavations.  Unfortunately, this leaves me with a giant pile of dirt and left the previous homeowner tons of cinder block shelf space for storing her preservatives.  And boy did she.  I hope to God this woman didn't starve to death because she never had needed to...there were jars and jars and jars and jars.....well, yeah.  Tons of canned stuff.  And all, after thirty years since she peacefully passed on, absolutely RANCID.  Just about every single one had a rusted off lid, and the ones that didn't were merely missing.  Have any of you every seen a jar of pickles after thirty years of being left open?  Yeah.  My point exactly. And that's the nicest image I can give you.  The others were infinitely worse.  And there were probably about 300 of them.  Of every assorted thing that can be preserved known to mankind.  Emitting every noxious smell every sniffed by mankind.  Dad had been industriously loading them up and taking them to the dump by the time I got there, so I only got to help with the last load (yes, your math is right....three total loads in a TRUCK).  After we got back from dumping our load (there was a lady at the dump who commented looks like someone is cleaning out a cellar...I was impressed with her intuition), Dad left me at the house with a hammer and an attitude.  I proceeded to beat the shit out of every rotten piece of wooden furniture in the basement I could find in order to break it down, clear it out, and make it easier later to get rid of it.  This task was made difficult by the very large amount of paint and rubbish stacked everywhere.  And when I say paint, I mean about 100 cans and bottles of  paint from the last 100 years.  These people kept everything.  And apparently repainted every portion of the house every year.  It was quite the task, but worth it.  Hopefully I don't succumb to some lung disease from breathing in all the noxious dust and mold from the rotten wood, but hey, we all gotta go, right?  It was a good first effort to cleaning the cellar and hopefully it'll look like a basement instead of a bad science experiment before too long.  As a post script, I want to apologize to all the spiders I made homeless and accidentally murdered today.  My bad.