house of Sisyphus
Home ownership (and to an extent, rental living) is a Sisyphean task. You push the boulder uphill: fix broken things, clean, make improvements. But it is always sliding back down. Sometimes you push faster; sometimes you lose ground.
But sometimes it has to get better before it gets worse. I haven't seriously gone through my clothes since moving in, and as my Ikea-bought furniture began to crumble, it finally gave me the impetus to go to Construction Junction, pick up some new dressers, and reorganize. Holy crap... I still had a pair of shoes from 1993. There were just piles and piles of things that were stained and torn and too small for me that I hadn't had the heart to throw away, hiding in the back of dressers and chests and closets and loose piles. With heavy heart, I threw more than half my clothes in the trash as unwearable and unwantable. About a third of what was left went into charitable (aka "nice stuff but I'm a fatass") piles. It is a little liberating but feels so decadent and wasteful... then again, keeping a pile of stained moth-eaten clothes in a pile for ten years is pretty wasteful, too. Let's try not to let it get that way again.
The point is, in the short term, cleaning meant more mess. The boulder has slid WAY downhill. The dining room is stacked with clothes; the upstairs bedroom has furniture and stuff piled in the middle as we finish breaking down the already-broken Ikea furniture and rearrange everything around the new dressers. It's embarrassing. No surprise visitors, please!
We'll get there, though. There is a (mostly) nice house under this mess. But then electrical work, the sink, someday the carpet... keep pushing that boulder!
But sometimes it has to get better before it gets worse. I haven't seriously gone through my clothes since moving in, and as my Ikea-bought furniture began to crumble, it finally gave me the impetus to go to Construction Junction, pick up some new dressers, and reorganize. Holy crap... I still had a pair of shoes from 1993. There were just piles and piles of things that were stained and torn and too small for me that I hadn't had the heart to throw away, hiding in the back of dressers and chests and closets and loose piles. With heavy heart, I threw more than half my clothes in the trash as unwearable and unwantable. About a third of what was left went into charitable (aka "nice stuff but I'm a fatass") piles. It is a little liberating but feels so decadent and wasteful... then again, keeping a pile of stained moth-eaten clothes in a pile for ten years is pretty wasteful, too. Let's try not to let it get that way again.
The point is, in the short term, cleaning meant more mess. The boulder has slid WAY downhill. The dining room is stacked with clothes; the upstairs bedroom has furniture and stuff piled in the middle as we finish breaking down the already-broken Ikea furniture and rearrange everything around the new dressers. It's embarrassing. No surprise visitors, please!
We'll get there, though. There is a (mostly) nice house under this mess. But then electrical work, the sink, someday the carpet... keep pushing that boulder!