Page 7 of Love It or List It
“This is gonna take a while,” Joe said as they stood in the front entryway, eyeing up the contents of their house.
“Did she ever throw anything away?”Austin wondered.From their current vantage point, it certainly looked like DeeDee Mitchell had never found an object she couldn’t keep.
Joe sighed.“Okay.I hate to say this, but we should probably start in the kitchen.As much as I want to tackle that stack of mystery boxes”—he gestured to the living room and a pile of mailing boxes, some apparently yet to be opened—“we should probably deal with the food before we regret… not dealing with the food.”
Austin swallowed and tried not to think about the mold or rodents that spoiled food could attract.
Fortunately, DeeDee’s hoarding hadn’t reached the stage of crowding the hallway to impassibility, so they were able to make their way to the kitchen without excavations.On their way through the dining room, Austin tore his attention away from the solid wood furniture pieces that were the stuff of interior design dreams and the box stuffed with paper and topped with a teal Pyrex bowl from the 1960s.
He locked his eyes on the kitchen doorway and followed Joe inside.
They were quiet for a handful of seconds.
Then Joe announced, “This is just depressing.”
Austin had to agree.The space was minuscule.In front of them to the right as they stopped in the doorway was the fridge, sandwiched between pantry cupboards and the old chimney.To their immediate left was a pink stove from the 1980s, complete with chrome handles and analog dials.The oven sat at the end of a set of U-shaped cupboards that ringed most of the kitchen, which was so tiny the oven door would actually block access to the lower cupboards when opened.Nearly every available surface was covered withstuff—canned goods, boxes of pasta, a jar of pens.
“Where should we start?”he asked faintly.The prospect of trying to organize this tiny, cramped kitchen made him want a nap.
Joe, apparently, wasn’t as daunted.He told Austin to avoid the fridge and waved at the countertops.“I’ll be right back.”
He backtracked to the front door, and Austin figured it wouldn’t hurt to follow directions just this once.The countertops were crowded with jars, tins, and dishes, but at least all the horrors were out in the open.He wasn’t looking forward to seeing what the cupboards had in store.Opening one might cause an avalanche.
Since the stovetop was mercifully clear, he figured it was a good place to start sorting—once he made sure all the dials were turned off.
He’d assessed a half-dozen lidless mason jars as undamaged and opened three tins to find tea, a package of unopened cookies, and several mismatched buttons by the time Joe returned with a plastic crate.
“I figured we’d need a few things.”He set the crate on the floor.Inside were a couple of folded boxes, some respirator masks, work gloves, rolls of packing tape, and an unopened box of garbage bags.
“We should start with three piles—garbage, donate, and undecided-slash-keep.”
Joe nodded.“Sounds good.Though I suspect the garbage pile is going to outweigh everything else.”He tore open the box of garbage bags, then shook out an extra-large, extra-strength black bag.“So, what have you already found for donation?”He held the bag out like he thought Austin might start throwing.
“Uh.”Austin hesitated.“Is food a donation item?”
“From this kitchen?”Joe asked, and, okay, that was a valid point.“Who knows how long some of this stuff has been here?Do you want to check expiry dates on everything?”
That wouldn’t be a good use of time.Austin knew that.But the idea of throwing away food that could still be safely eaten when he knew how many families went without made his chest feel tight.
“Maybe we need a fourth pile,” he said after a moment.“Food items to sort through later.Anything that’s open or partially consumed can go out, otherwise we put it in a box to look at in, like….”
Joe’s lips twitched.“In, like, four more months when we’ve finished going through the junk in the rest of the house and it’s had that much more time to expire?”
Austin huffed but stood his ground.“Humor me.”
Joe shook his head, but he built a box and helped Austin start packing unopened boxes of mac and cheese, Rice-A-Roni, and more cans of tuna than Austin had seen at one time outside of a Costco.Between that and getting rid of all the open food, they had a whole four square feet of counter space after only twenty minutes.
“Okay, that was a good idea,” Joe admitted.He pulled a Sharpie out of his back pocket and marked the box with FOOD, then carried it out to the dining room, where it would probably get lost in the pile of other crap, but it wasn’t like they could put it outside in the rain.“Let’s go with ‘other things that are obviously trash’ next.”
Stacks of old bills, decaying rubber bands, and bread tags were easy enough to agree on.But Austin protested when Joe dropped one of the tins of assorted screws and nails into the bag.
“Hey!Those are still usable.”
Joe cocked an eyebrow.“You want to reach in and grab them, be my guest.”
One of the things they tossed was a jar of grease from beside the sink.Austin was plenty familiar with getting greasy, but rancid cooking grease that had been sitting in DeeDee’s kitchen for at least four months—and probably way longer, given the state of the house—was a whole other category of gross than run-of-the-mill WD-40.“Everyone needs a good can of hardware,” he grumbled sulkily.
“Maybe, but”—Joe gestured around them—“in case you haven’t noticed, we have our work cut out for us.It’s not like we’re not going to find another six tins of random crap.We can’t save them all.We’ll be here forever.”
