What to do with complete autonomy and no guests: 2 days of projects

The "mud season" began yesterday morning, which is to say that the guest season ended and over half the staff left the ranch. Last mud season, also called "off season", I flew back to Indiana, so I didn't quite know what was expected of me.

So far so good! Without guests around to attend to and clean up after, and with some solid coworkers to work alongside, I've seen more accomplished in 2 work days than I would have ever imagined.




The former housekeeping department head and I (current housekeeping department head!) have been sorting through, throwing away, donating, reselling, and reorganizing probably five full years worth of clutter and useless linens that have ended up in our department. In about 2 more days, we will have found homes for almost every misplaced item, sorted out about 8 bags of old/ugly/useless-to-us-but-still-nice bedding and sheet sets to sell at a garage sale in May, and completely transformed the 8' by 24' of essentially worthless storage space that we started in on yesterday morning.






I wanted to move out a shelving unit of staff sheets and pillows out of the housekeeping room and move it to the staff laundry room. Not in our way anymore and much closer to the place where they are actually used.

The project was started and finished yesterday.





Met yesterday with the head of maintenance to talk about ideas for redoing the entire shelving and storage system. Our drinks are currently stored in 4 different places around the room. Queen and twin fitted sheets get mixed up ( = wasted time running back from cabins for the correct sheet) because there is no vertical divider between them with our current system. One of the cabinets is an old sink base. Which has a hole for the plumbing. Which mice like to run up through. Sanitary place to store mugs and silverware? Not so much.

He's switching them all out and we should have a completely new, more intuitive, better organized, and far more functional shelving system by the end of April.





Not to mention changing out the toilet seat in my new bathroom, finding a new box frame for my bed in old storage, locating caulk to redo the seal around my bathroom floor and shower, going to my first seasonal managers meeting, starting the process of finding and repairing broken vacuums from all over the ranch (7 found so far...), making a page long list of ideas for off season projects and ideas, and washing, folding, and storing all of the guest and staff laundry that was piled up in mountains from the end of the season (with the help of one of my coworkers from my crew last season.)




And it's just the second day. I'm getting the impression that I do well in work situations with high trust, high autonomy, and a good amount of unstructured time....

Viva la Mud Season.