After eighteen years of living in the same house and not doing too much in the way of remodeling, Donna Sue and I are ripping up carpet, putting down new flooring, painting the walls a new color and rearranging the pictures on the walls. The project, long overdue, has led me to some interesting thoughts.

For instance, before you can redo the floors, you have to move everything out of the room. Here is something that is hard to understand. How can so much “stuff” accumulate in such a small room?

I go to the store and buy pasteboard boxes for packing. The small bedroom that we transformed into our office had books, printers, and desks to cover up with papers that should be read, but once the papers are put on the desk, they get covered up with other papers and are not seen for, well, the rest of time.

It’s hard to believe, but when I was filling up one box with papers off the desk, I think I found an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. I’ll have to check with Antiques Roadshow to make sure!

At first I bought six pasteboard boxes. I knew in my heart of hearts that those six boxes would not contain all the “stuff’ and I would need a few more, but I never thought I would have to go back for twenty more boxes.

Here’s what I can’t understand. If I took all the boxes that I filled with “stuff” from that one small bedroom-turned-into-office and tried to put them back in the same room, the room would not be big enough to hold them. How is that possible?

Now the boxes have to go somewhere; but where? I got it. I will rent one of those short-term rental storage units. Just a small one and just for a short period of time. I’m glad I inherited my Daddy’s truck. I filled it up six times and found that I needed a large unit. Where did all this “stuff” come from?

We empty the room and take up the carpet. I’m a Second Amendment man, against gun-control, and I know why now. I don’t know what has been living under that carpet, but it sure made a mess. And I was locked and loaded, ready for it.

Donna Sue and I wanted that wood flooring. We have it in some parts of the house and like it, so the more the better.

Then I find out something else I don’t understand. The flooring installer was doing a good job and the finished product looked great. Then he tells me that it’s not wood. It’s plastic.

“What?” I asked with surprise. “It looks like wood and feels like wood when I walk on it.”

“But it’s not wood,” he says. “There’s not a toothpick’s worth of wood in it.”

“Don’t tell anybody,” I said. Then I thought, it won’t be too long before even toothpicks won’t be wood. What is the world coming to?

Finally, we wanted to paint the walls a new color. Donna Sue asks, “What color do you want to paint the walls? I have to admit I had never thought about that. What do I know about colors? All I have ever heard was something called “egg-shell.” Not the brown eggs; the other kind.

That’s the color the walls were, but I didn’t know that. Donna Sue convinces me that it would be silly to re-paint the walls the same color, so she came up with another color. After asking me what I thought, I said, “I don’t.” Have a thought, that is!