It doesn’t take much. When I was 12, a new decal from the five and dime set me off. I charged into a cleaning, fix-it spree that turned my bedroom upside down and inside out with closet-cleaning and painting.

And now, with spring upon us, I feel the same dangerous itch.

This time, a beeping smoke detector launched the madness. “I can’t keep changing these every few months!” I growled. And set out on a crusade to tame the battery-eating monsters.

Thanks to Google, the answer came easy. Seems the little buggers start wearing out after 10 years or so. Replace them with new-fangled ones that have 10-year sealed lithium batteries, and you’ve bought yourself a decade of peace. Also, a wise reprieve from climbing stepladders.

Cheered on by such a speedy victory, I immediately turned to the kitchen clock: 12-feet up and anchored to the wall by a nail that invariably falls out and disables the garbage disposal every time daylight savings time comes and goes.

“Enough!” I declared. A sink stopper might have been a better choice, but instead I sprung for an atomic, radio-controlled wall clock with a long-life battery. It automatically adjusts to time changes through some mysterious connection to a time signal radio station near Fort Collins, Colorado. Or so they say.

Undeterred by the clock, I forged ahead. I found some clever little pop-up canisters that seemed just the right size to house the growing collection of K Cups littering the floors of two closets.

The canisters led to pulling every scrap from the closets in a fervent search for K Cups, which I could then categorize and canister-ize and label according to regular, decaf, flavored, tea, hot chocolate and cider.

When one thing’s pristine, everything else looks shabby. Suddenly, a black ink stain the size of my hand on in the center of the upstairs carpet began to worry me. So did walking around the trashcan I’d been using to cover it up.

This led to a frantic search on Pinterest to see if some clever crafter had figured out a way to cut out stains and replace them with carpet scraps. But the more I looked at the carpet, the more stains I saw, so off to cost-comparisons on actually replacing it, as well as an analysis of VOC levels, Angie’s List reports, and inquiries on who would be willing to let the carpet “out-gas” in the warehouse for a couple of days before installation.

Of course, no carpet goes in without clearing the floor, which meant finally shipping six boxes of left-behind books to my daughter in Portland – but only after a one-hour Facetime conversation in which she looked at every cover to be sure she needed them. She rejected four (books, not boxes).

Looking floor-ward, I could not help but notice that a small area of the kitchen hardwood was beginning to look tired from overuse, which prompted a parade of floor experts eager to remove every stick of furniture and send me on a week-long vacation away from the fumes.

Not a bad idea considering the likely expense of staying home and noticing what else could be spruced up this spring.

I think a road trip is my new best friend.

Copyright 2017 Pat Snyder