Furniture Tetris, Round 374
Furniture Tetris, how I hate it! This annoying game whereby I have to move three to seven different things to make room for the thing I want. It would be less infuriating if half the stuff I'm moving wasn't stuff I can't get to where I need to put them, because I have - or more frequently someone else has - Tetris'd in the place where I need to put the stuff. It's hit the point where I actually shudder at the thought of having people coming to help me. Because, although stuff does get fixed, it invariably results in my having to then work out what they moved, where they moved it, what I now can't get to, and what I'm going to have to do to fix it.
My next move is to get ruthless, I think. There are boxes and boxes of things waiting to be taken away. Boxes of magazines that I've been waiting for a friend to make arrangements to collect for over 2 years now. I'll give it one more shot, and then the whole lot is going into the recycling. Boxes of books another friend persuaded me not to hand straight over to the local charity shop because she was sure her local community centre would love them. One more email to her, and then the whole lot goes. Boxes of packing beads and bubble wrap I've put up for freecycle three times, and three times have had no shows. I want this shit out of my house!
I love that one friend helped get books out of boxes and onto shelves in the library. The problem is, I had stacks of books on the floor before, and it drove me bonkers because I couldn't get access to the shelves to put them away. I eventually sorted it, they wound up on shelves, and then just had boxes of Denise's books waiting to be unpacked instead. I did say - you will need to move all the books in the fiction section several times to get them to fit. I did say, multiple times - please put the books on the shelves, you will need to move things several times, please put these books up before you unpack any more boxes...
And now I have stacks of books on the floor waiting to go onto the shelves. Again. And no room to do so.
And because I feel like I'm right back where I started (even though, intellectually, I know there has been progress) I can't bear to go in to fix it. And I don't want anyone's help to fix it either, because I can't bear the thought of what else I'm going to have to clean up after later. And that's the problem - people wanting to help but ignoring what I ask them to do. I have an unusable sewing room and a living room I can't find a damn thing in because a former tenant (who is also a friend) completely ignored what I asked him to do, and he roped in a mutual friend to help make it worse. I've lost a dozen lots of 2,000 year old Egyptian fiance beads because a house sitting friend tidied up my living room and kitchen and I don't know where she put anything - and I now have another 9 boxes of stuff I have to sort through, piled up in corners. I have one friend I gave $300 to three years ago with the agreement that she'd help me set up the vegetable garden, which has never happened, because she's said I need to get garden beds put in first - except that it's the making the beds and, more especially, getting in the top soil and the mulch to do that which I'm having problems with, not the planting. But she's not hearing me say "I need help from someone who can drive to get this stuff..." Another person has my miniscaff which I need to do repairs to the guttering and keeps telling me they'll just finish the job they borrowed it for and bring it down... for 4 years. And I feel like I can't throw a fit because I need his help with the roof work that I'm too heavy to do myself. I don't trust anyone else to prune my trees or roses any more after the butchering they've received in the past, but I'm not fit enough to do the job myself. The cestrum is half cut down, but the rest is still untouched and I don't want to nag the friend helping me with that to come back and finish the job (even if its just taking me and a load of greenwaste to the dump).
I feel like I can't say anything, because they have done *something* to help. But it's all three steps forward, two steps back in a different direction. And I've been struggling so hard for years to get it sorted out by myself. To top it off, every time I've managed to get part of the house sane - the kitchen cleared, the library sorted out, the bedroom de-cluttered, the sewing room in working order - someone else has come along and trashed it. It's exhausting, and I want to cry every time I try again.
I want to punch another friend who I have agreed can set up a work shop in my shed every time he grumbles about me putting stuff in there. I truly appreciate the work he and two other friends did cleaning it up and organising it, but a) I caught him at the last bonfire happily burning a box of my mother's papers without even thinking that maybe he should check with me first (fortunately as far as I can tell all of the important stuff in the box was at the bottom) and b) it's MY DAMN SHED! I've suffered 8 years of other people shifting my things down there without telling me (including, as it turns out, the box full of all my mother's photos I'd thought were lost) as well as dumping their own unwanted things down there; it's meant that I haven't been able to use it AS I WANT TO! And I hate that I now feel like I can't move the furniture I'm selling/freecycling down there temporarily, because I'll have to listen to him complain. And I want to grind my teeth every time he ignores something I say about the space and how I'm happy for it to be used.
I feel like the junkyard woman from Labyrinth.