Trying to clear things in the house. Again.

[gottawonder]

Well, it's back to the never ending task of trying to throw out crap, dispose of some things responsibly, and to put things away where they belong or create a place for them.

The unfinished bedroom sits unfinished.

Last winter, my husband grandly stated that he would get it finished. I cleared out all the piled up stuff from that room so that he could finish the floor, and I could finish the walls.

Only very little happened. In an entire winter, all he did was cut away a small section of the wall, and he didn't even haul the pieces of that wall out of the house until summer.

So, now I am looking at that room because he says he might get two weeks off in December. Why could we not make good progress on that room in that time?

But it requires it being empty again. There is only a few things like jackets and a bit of animal gear that are due to me, and the rest of it is....tools. They cannot possibly be tools required to finish that room. Not all of them.

Tools that I don't even know why they are in that room. What were they being used for?

Did you know that about half of our basement also has tools in it? Tools and piles of materials for...ironically, finishing the house. We can't finish the house because there is never any space to set up tools properly, and a great deal of that space is taken up by tools and materials.

So tonight I tried desperately to make some kind of headway.

I picked up a pile of winter hats and gloves and such, and washed them. I don't recognize any of them as being currently worn, so I will clean them and store them close by in case we need them.

I washed some clothes that were set aside to go to the thrift store. They were clothes that have been sitting there for some time, and that's my fault.

There are piles of clothes that were destined to be rags, but some part of me is always a little weird about cutting up shirts for rags, especially because these were mostly t-shirts set aside by my husband that were a little worn, but not worn out. The thrift store wouldn't sell them, so they needed to be rags, but part of me felt bad cutting up shirts that were merely "not being worn a lot".

Anyhow, I cut up a whole bunch of t-shirts and a few sweat shirts, and now there is a big bag of rags that I will take to our mechanic.

I tried putting a few things into their "new" places in the mud room, only to find that the drawers in there that were supposed to be mainly for animal things and garden things already have bits and pieces of things that can only be described as "hardware".

Some hooks, a faucet set that according to my husband won't be used by us, but also needs to be kept. I am baffled by this. There are also boxes in the unfinished bedroom that just contain random things like keys that I put away into the proper key box I established, and loose change, and a massive amount of Canadian Tire money that I put into a ziploc bag and put in my husband's wardrobe with his other weird hoard of things that don't belong anywhere else.

There are small tools sitting on just about every surface in the addition. Bits of things that look like they were...not needed from things he put together?

Dear lord, I am tired of always just sifting through crap and trying to make sense of it.

All of this is GARAGE STUFF, but it lives in our house because we are working on it. BUT IT'S GARAGE STUFF.

I don't know how he even knows where to look for things. I think he relies on there being SO MANY tiny sets of wrenches and pliers lying on every surface that if he reaches out his hand he'll find one.

SCREWS!!!!! Every single part of the house has a bowl or a jar or a box with random screws in it. I think it is time for me to have one big screw jar, and every time I find one, in the giant jar it goes.

Once again, all this makes me feel is like I am overwhelmed by all of our crap. We USE a fraction of what we own, BUT if we need it once a year, then you do need to keep it.

We have raincoats that only get used for maybe a week in the spring, but you need a raincoat. Five other jackets or more for various "cooler" days, Several heavy jackets, the gross jackets for doing chores.

I don't even know where to begin on gloves and hats. We are only two people. I bet we have fifty pairs of gloves each. Work gloves, garden gloves, the old gross gloves that "are maybe still okay if we need them", the many pairs of really nice mittens and gloves that we buy and then put away and then forget where we put them and find them years later. After we gave up looking and bought new ones.

No one ever tells you when you are a kid how weird and tiresome and endless this kind of thing gets.

Comments

[cf2princessawnw]

I can only imagine, and I'm guessing that because your house is still not fully set up, that makes it even harder to know where to put things. The absolute only thing that has ever worked for me is having designated spaces, in my case almost like you would have for a little kid so I get excited to put it away LOL. Otherwise it's just a matter of remembering under which pile of clutter the item I'm looking for might be. Best of wishes and luck with all of this there, as you still try to settle. And maybe that's one way to look at it??? They give yourself at least a little bit of Grace knowing that you did move and there are still things that don't have homes because your home isn't completely finished. I know it's a process, but some of your clutter so to speak is not from habit but from inability to have one yet if that makes sense.

[gottawonder]

That's part of the issue. The downstairs bedroom is finished, but I want to paint a wall one more time, so we're not really treating it as "finished". The items we want to put in there can't be set up properly yet.

The downstairs bathroom is ALMOST finished, but the shower door isn't in place, so it isn't being treated as "done" either.

The tools in the basement will likely be there for years to come, as it will be a long time before every last bit of work will be done, if ever truly finished. If/when we are done, it will be hard to break him of the habit of just dumping things in the basement for "later".

This is the man, after all, who once left a huge tow chain piled in the corner of our kitchen when we lived in Wyoming. I tried to let HIM realize that it didn't belong there, but you know, he never did. I blew up at him finally after a few weeks, and he was SHOCKED that it upset me. He even tried to defend it being there, and was visibly upset that I was going to stick to my guns about it.

Yup.

All those people who say "your husband is such a nice man" don't realize that as nice as he is, he has some quirks. Of course I do too.

So, there are all KINDS of things in the basement that are meant to be part of the rec room when it is finished down there. We plan to put up a bunch of book shelves so all of my books can finally come out of their boxes. They've been in storage for about five years now and I can't really get to them. It's driving me nuts.

So the books are all stored in what SHOULD be a big pantry/cold room for vegetables and canned goods.

There's a few items of furniture down there too, not being able to be used as a couch or a chair because they are stacked in a corner, the rest of the space filled with drywall and wood and tools.

We aren't finished the mudroom yet, and there are no appropriate hooks for jackets or a boot rack, so things are just piled up all over the place.

I would say that not having things done is a huge barrier to getting things organized.

[cf2princessawnw]

I hope you can give Grayson seeing that a lot of the disorganization is nobody's fault. Those things don't have homes yet. Their individual homes are still being built, and they are a little vagrant vagabonds that mean no harm but are getting in everyone's way or can't be found when they're needed. I hope that you're able to finish some of those projects that can make the greatest impact for your organization and peace of mind. And just the flow of Life. People don't talk about the flow of Life enough but that really is where a lot of frustration and energy loss can come in I think.

[gottawonder]

Sometimes I can be in that frame of mind, where I try not to resent the disorganization too much because their "place" doesn't exist yet.

It isn't easy though, after about five years of there being no "places" for these things.

One thing I will say, is that we have decent organization in the kitchen, as far as utensils having places, pots and pans and tupperware. We were able to move things from the trailer directly into the house without storing it in between (literally things were walked across the driveway when the house was still sitting on blocks). We put things in drawers, and that was that.

I was listening to a YouTube channel person describe her own struggle with organization, because her family wasn't on board. She was saying that everyone just put things away in random places, so even the normal cutlery was just thrown into the drawer instead of into a proper plastic organizer, and there were things like ketchup packages and disposable chopsticks thrown in there, and that the whole kitchen was like that, and she never knew where to find simple things like a can opener or a lid for a pot.

It made me appreciate that my husband and I are on board with the kitchen, we are both very good about putting things back where they belong, and no garbage is mixed in with the cutlery.

So there. We have something that functions the way it is supposed to function.

[cf2princessawnw]

Good that you could find that video and encouragement to see that all those slowly, you're both definitely making progress together in the same direction.

[gottawonder]

After hearing this woman's description of how disorganized her kitchen was, it made me feel like we were doing SOMETHING RIGHT at least. Celebrate the small victories.

[cf2princessawnw]

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