General update.
Dec. 14th, 2024 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderAs usual, I've been trying to just put on a happy face, while underneath there is pretty much always a certain amount of frustration about the lack of progress on the house.
Yes, back in October we got the wood stove installed, and that was great. If it makes sense, my husband was kind of just "well, that's good enough for now, isn't it?". If I didn't insist otherwise, I'm pretty sure he would think that was his hall pass for at least the rest of the winter.
No, we have a large portion of the addition that isn't finished. The mudroom is not quite done, the small porch is not quite done, the bathroom downstairs is STILL not quite done. Those are the rooms with the most progress, about 90%, but the little porch needs baseboards and new linoleum. The mudroom needs an upper cupboard and baseboards and two window frames and a cracked window fixed, and a door frame too.
The bathroom downstairs needs a tiny amount of paint (my job) and the shower door installed. He literally did not install the shower door because I needed a tiny touch up of paint above the bathtub, and it has now sat there for over six months.
There is a sweet little space above the addition that is meant to be connected to an upstairs bedroom, and I don't know if it will ever be done in our time in this house. Nothing at all has been done on it in since the addition was put up.
The bedroom in the addition stagnates. My husband salvaged old flooring from a house being demolished that was about the same age as ours. It's old fir boards, exactly the same as our floors.
He started that floor about three years ago. No meaningful progress has taken place since last winter, when about half of the floor was installed, and then the project just...halted.
In the past few weeks I've been "being nice" about getting back to it again. I removed some things stored in there, talked to him about trying to at least get tools ready in his time after work one night, trying to do SOMETHING, and nothing.
So, the usual thing happens. I blew up at him last night. Whenever this happens, he acts like he has NO IDEA that I was so upset. NO IDEA why I'm angry. He tries to blame it on my childhood, or my brain chemistry.
He can't just grasp that I am ALWAYS angry inside about the house not being finished. It is a constant low to medium frustration, like a shrill whining sound that never goes away.
Like a shrill whining sound, you can sometimes manage to tune it out, or just leave the house and try to forget about the work that needs doing. Find distractions, or just absorb myself in my animals or my interests.
Then something makes me snap, like asking him in a very pointed way yesterday what we should do with our day on Saturday, since I didn't think we needed to go to the city again.
He says "All I really need to do is go to the dump, so we could try to do something fun later or something".
His response to me asking over and over the last few weeks about working on the house has resulted in him finding every other excuse NOT to work on the house. We burned old hay last weekend, we did odd jobs, he all of a sudden has developed a burning desire to bake things night after night.
Today I woke up just drained from fighting last night, even though we did sort of end with a truce, but not an action plan other than "I will try to get something done over the Christmas break".
I was just so tired. Tired that the only real work that happens is because I have to have a fit of rage first. He literally doesn't start doing work on the house anymore without it. He doesn't motivate himself to do it, and kind words and kind requests do nothing. Nothing but rage will suffice, and it makes me so tired that I can't make anything happen any other way.
If I did not scream and cry and literally burn myself alive with rage, which he barely seems to register, by the way, he wouldn't register that I am displeased at all, or he wouldn't CARE enough to do anything.
After going to the dump, and doing my chores, I just went to bed again because I just couldn't care about anything else.
He came to sit with me, and after a while I said "well, can we try doing something"? To which he replied "Sure. Do you want to help me bake some buns to take to work?".
No, I do not want to help you bake god damned buns for work.
Can anyone in the entire world be so F#cking clueless?
So. After a rage episode and a day of crying, he is working on the floor.
God help me.
Yes, back in October we got the wood stove installed, and that was great. If it makes sense, my husband was kind of just "well, that's good enough for now, isn't it?". If I didn't insist otherwise, I'm pretty sure he would think that was his hall pass for at least the rest of the winter.
No, we have a large portion of the addition that isn't finished. The mudroom is not quite done, the small porch is not quite done, the bathroom downstairs is STILL not quite done. Those are the rooms with the most progress, about 90%, but the little porch needs baseboards and new linoleum. The mudroom needs an upper cupboard and baseboards and two window frames and a cracked window fixed, and a door frame too.
The bathroom downstairs needs a tiny amount of paint (my job) and the shower door installed. He literally did not install the shower door because I needed a tiny touch up of paint above the bathtub, and it has now sat there for over six months.
There is a sweet little space above the addition that is meant to be connected to an upstairs bedroom, and I don't know if it will ever be done in our time in this house. Nothing at all has been done on it in since the addition was put up.
The bedroom in the addition stagnates. My husband salvaged old flooring from a house being demolished that was about the same age as ours. It's old fir boards, exactly the same as our floors.
He started that floor about three years ago. No meaningful progress has taken place since last winter, when about half of the floor was installed, and then the project just...halted.
In the past few weeks I've been "being nice" about getting back to it again. I removed some things stored in there, talked to him about trying to at least get tools ready in his time after work one night, trying to do SOMETHING, and nothing.
So, the usual thing happens. I blew up at him last night. Whenever this happens, he acts like he has NO IDEA that I was so upset. NO IDEA why I'm angry. He tries to blame it on my childhood, or my brain chemistry.
He can't just grasp that I am ALWAYS angry inside about the house not being finished. It is a constant low to medium frustration, like a shrill whining sound that never goes away.
Like a shrill whining sound, you can sometimes manage to tune it out, or just leave the house and try to forget about the work that needs doing. Find distractions, or just absorb myself in my animals or my interests.
Then something makes me snap, like asking him in a very pointed way yesterday what we should do with our day on Saturday, since I didn't think we needed to go to the city again.
He says "All I really need to do is go to the dump, so we could try to do something fun later or something".
His response to me asking over and over the last few weeks about working on the house has resulted in him finding every other excuse NOT to work on the house. We burned old hay last weekend, we did odd jobs, he all of a sudden has developed a burning desire to bake things night after night.
Today I woke up just drained from fighting last night, even though we did sort of end with a truce, but not an action plan other than "I will try to get something done over the Christmas break".
I was just so tired. Tired that the only real work that happens is because I have to have a fit of rage first. He literally doesn't start doing work on the house anymore without it. He doesn't motivate himself to do it, and kind words and kind requests do nothing. Nothing but rage will suffice, and it makes me so tired that I can't make anything happen any other way.
If I did not scream and cry and literally burn myself alive with rage, which he barely seems to register, by the way, he wouldn't register that I am displeased at all, or he wouldn't CARE enough to do anything.
After going to the dump, and doing my chores, I just went to bed again because I just couldn't care about anything else.
He came to sit with me, and after a while I said "well, can we try doing something"? To which he replied "Sure. Do you want to help me bake some buns to take to work?".
No, I do not want to help you bake god damned buns for work.
Can anyone in the entire world be so F#cking clueless?
So. After a rage episode and a day of crying, he is working on the floor.
God help me.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-17 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-17 10:34 pm (UTC)I understand that he's busy, he works all day, that he doesn't get much time to do nothing. I actually feel badly about that.
Yet, when you take something on, like a whole house to be redone/finished, that should be a priority until it's done.
We are now to a point where he could take a very laid back approach to it (and he kind of has done that) where he could just work on it when he felt like it, the way a person might have a jigsaw puzzle sitting on a table in the corner, waiting for you to feel like putting in another piece and then leaving it for weeks.
After all, the yucky bathroom on the main floor WORKS, and there is no NEED to get the new one installed. We don't NEED the living space downstairs to be finished, nor do we NEED the bedroom to be done. We COULD theoretically just live in the house in this state.
We COULD live with all of the tools downstairs, the stack of drywall in the middle of the basement, the pile of wood for the bedroom floor. For five years. For ten years. Until we are decrepit and have to move and let it be someone else's problem.
A month of no house progress then becomes two, and when I get angry, he goes right into wild defense mode where he says "it's not like I don't do anything", and he's right. There are lots of things he does, just not on the house.
It's hard to get him to understand that the house requires planning and the drive to do something even when it isn't an immediate need, and that's the difference.
He will work on all kinds of things when they present an IMMEDIATE NEED, like doing the dishes and baking cookies for the office Christmas party at work, or getting the tires changed on the car. Those things have easily apparent deadlines.
The house no longer has an easily apparent deadline, and he seems to lack the internal drive to create one, so it stagnates.
Any time I try to create a timeline, he freaks out. Doesn't matter if I break it down into small bits, he loses his mind. I could say "can we try to have the floor installed this winter" and he gets very upset and is like "you don't understand, things don't work that way".
He's right. I don't understand.
Most of the time too, he AGREES to a deadline eventually, and then just ignores it and I lose trust in his "word".
He had agreed LAST YEAR to have the floor in that bedroom installed, and when I brought that up when he agreed again, he got upset. Again, he was like "yes, because I ran into a problem".
A problem that he solved the other day by looking at it again for half an hour.
It's a tiring, ongoing struggle for me to try to keep things moving forward, and he fails to recognize that for the last few years, all of the bigger things that actually got done were because I was behind the change.
Getting rid of the sea can, cleaning up the yard, getting a guy to finish moving the pile of dirt in our yard and remove the mountain of concrete that had sat there for two years, finding someone to install stairs to the basement, getting the wood stove, finding a guy to finish the interior window frames, on and on those things only happened because I got after my husband and in some cases just found a person who could do them and got it done.
Part of the problem is he literally doesn't REMEMBER what the yard looked like when I freaked out and started attacking the problems. I KNOW that he doesn't really remember how bad it was, because now the yard looks exactly like it did before the house project again, nice and clean and all evened out again, so he's erased that two-three year period where the whole yard was a giant pile of clay and a giant pile of concrete with deep tire ruts and torn up sod, with lumber and siding piles and all the ductwork he tore out of the trailer and stacked on the lawn, and all of the raw dirt around the house that I covered in mulch and created a walking path.
I can tell when I mention the work I did that he doesn't remember how bad it was. How bad it would still be if I hadn't demanded that we clean it up and pay people to haul things away and do landscaping.
Even finding the house in the first place was me. We had been living in the crumbling trailer for far too long, and he said we couldn't afford a new modular home, and needed to find a house that could be moved onto our property.
That said, he also did not actively look for a house to move onto our property. I actively looked for a house that could be moved onto our property myself, and I found it on Facebook marketplace, and it was the perfect choice.
Yes, at that point he did jump on the opportunity and really, REALLY worked like an absolute demon that summer to get the house onto a basement and ready to live in. He REALLY put his whole heart into it like I've never seen before.
Now we are sliding into a kind of complacency about the pace, and I'm so tired of being the "enforcer".
no subject
Date: 2024-12-18 08:52 am (UTC)Being the Enforcer, though, means you get to set reasonable rules. It's your hearth and home, and you should be content, living in reasonable comfort.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-18 10:15 am (UTC)I know that this entire time, we've been working at it. Furiously for the first year, a little less so for the next two years, and slowed right down this last year or so.
We do live in reasonable comfort, but if it makes sense, you just look around at the bathroom and think "this is an ugly bathroom and it doesn't have to be this way".