Coming Out Of The Closet
I was laying in bed last night when I was swept over with all this motivation to work on the office. Of course, it was 10 at night and I was not going to get out of bed, but I felt like I'd mentally decided in that moment that it was time to start getting some of the rooms in this house in order. The timing seems about right too, as in all the places I've lived for extended periods of time it was somewhere around the three year mark where I had finally settled in and decided to start making real changes with furniture, paint, pictures on the walls etc etc.
Way back when we first moved into this house, we only had a few weeks to enjoy our new life together before the Sparrow's dad went into the hospital. I despise the man still, and though I never knew him for most of his life, it became clear during that time that he was doing what he always did, destroyed people's lives and made it all about him. It may sound like a callous thing to say when the man was hospitalized after being found on the floor of his house by his mistress/girlfriend, but he was a subpar human being, and disease nor death will force me to feel the slightest sympathy for the man.
This point of this little trip down memory lane is to explain why all the closets got loaded with boxes. Why items were never sorted and put into place. Chaos reined because suddenly the Sparrow's sister was coming into town and needed to stay here. So we had to make our new house as presentable as possible. After that, the boxes and totes just stayed in the closets. Items we owned and clearly didn't miss have been sitting behind those doors for years now. Begging the question: Why do we have this stuff.
The clutter in the closets doesn't necessarily affect anything, but it just seemed to cause chaos outside in the rest of the room. We have furniture we just put into place in here because we had it and had nowhere for it. Shelves that don't really work. Items on the shelves that were put there to try to make it seem "fun" and lived in, but they actually are just collecting dust and looking messy. Pictures hung on the walls simply because there were either already nails there, or I was attempting to make it seem like I'd settled into the space by trying to make it look like my old offices in my old residences.
What needs to happen is that everything needs to be moved out of here. The stuff in the closet needs to go downstairs. The totes can either be sorted through or just stored down there, but they don't need to be taking up closet space in big, messy piles. I've got a dozen lava lamps on shelves, next to their boxes, taking up double the space. I don't have the proper setup to display some of them. Others come out from Halloween or Christmas and then just get thrown back on the shelves.
Another reason this whole thing has been dragged out is the wiring that needs to occur. The Comcast modem and the network setup for the whole house needs to go into the basement. As I've written before, every room has coax jacks on the walls (and in the case of the office, a set of three outlet boxes jury-rigged to the outside of the wall with phone jacks in them) that all need to be replaced with network jacks. I bought the cable three years ago, the outlet covers and all the rest of the stuff to do this but it has never happened. Wireless may be fine here and there, but I want my computers and the Apple TVs and such hardwired. It is just my personal preference.
And not a difficult task, just a matter of pulling through the network cables when pulling out the coax cables. It just hasn't happened yet.
The only headache part potentially will be getting the Comcast modem itself down stairs. Right now the coax for that comes straight through the drywall and the brick from outside into the office. There is a hole drilled into the cement foundation down there that a big bunch of cables go through for the old satellite dish that is still on the roof. I cut those cables outside a few years ago, but the remnants remain, caulked into the hole in the foundation. I could conceivably carve out the caulk and old cable, reconnect a new coax to the Comcast box outside and run it through myself. It really isn't that difficult of a thing.
Then the metal rack just needs to be mounted on the wall down there to hold the equipment up and it would be done. It all sounds so simple, and it is simple. But, come the end of the workday all motivation to do even the simplest things is lost.
I hate painting, but I can do it. There are some major drywall repairs that need to happen including removing the old school intercom on the wall. We tried doing this at the old house and our patchwork was less than stellar. But, we know the gist of it, perhaps we could do better now.
I was just complaining about money the other day, and it would cost some money to do all this. I desperately need a new desk as I am using an old Ikea kitchen table I've had since at least 2012 I think. I like a nice, big desk. I was looking at a desk that raises and lowers, where you pick out your own top. And Home Depot sells such desktops which I've priced out. We'd need some shelving, the Sparrow would also need a desk of his own. We'd both need office chairs, as mine has had a broken wheel for months and is barely functional.
It'd be good for us though to do this. I think we both need to feel the accomplishment of a job done. We have a lot of projects and things that only ever seem to get halfway accomplished. The yard especially and outside stuff never seems to ever get done. There's always yet another thing to do out there, not to mention the time it takes for plants to mature so our vision out there can be "complete".
I went through a couple boxes this morning. One had a bunch of old watches of my dad's, and one Fossil watch of mine I used to wear in the 1990s. It'd be fun to get them fixed and use them. I had some very, VERY old Charlie Brown/Peanuts paperbacks. Some of which are literally falling apart and decaying. I loved them as a child, but I am never going to read them again. The ones that are still in one piece can go to the secondhand store, the rest have already gone in the garbage.
I have this large packet of art prints my dad had for years. They are painted by Vietnam War vets, and depict scenes and such from the war. I do not think they were even legitimately sold and were once the property of the State Department or something. I have no idea how my dad got his hands on them. I doubt I'd ever get any framed, but perhaps they could be donated to a VFW or something? I am sure there is some value to them. But, the were first rotting in my parent's attic and now they've been in a box here for three years. The large manilla envelope they are in literally turning to particles.
The Sparrow and I get into ruts. Work is so demotivating, and it works its evil on both of us. So neither of us often can lift the other out of it. We are both content to just get on the couch after work and be sloths. I want to have motivation, and as I always say, unfortunately I am a morning person and my motivation often comes around 5:30 in the morning and dwindles by 11 AM. I don't think I need to force myself to change, just to make the time in those mornings to start. Even if I am just moving boxes and sorting stuff in the mornings for the time being. It's something.
I'll see what I can do today.
A funny side note I may have mentioned before. Our closet in the master bedroom is not really big enough for all our clothes and I have since we moved in talked about using the office closet for my stuff. The Sparrow has poo-pooed that thought more than once because of some crazy idea he has that we need to share a closet, otherwise it is saying something negative about our marriage. I openly mock him about this, telling him that if we used two different closets all our stuff is still in the same house.
It just makes more sense to split our clothes up. He has a drawer in the armoire filled with 50 or a hundred concert t-shirts. He can't even see everything he has because they are all just jammed in there. Not to mention, I *HATE* folding his laundry on laundry day because he puts all his t-shirts and work polos into draws, where as I consider this things items that should be on hangers. It takes so much more time for me to put the laundry away having to fold his stuff. If it was all on hangers it would legitimately save me five or ten minutes every Monday.
In fantasy world, the two-closet solution would only be temporary until we saved the funds to completely gut this side of the house and make a master bedroom suite, with a walk-in closet... Dare to dream.
Way back when we first moved into this house, we only had a few weeks to enjoy our new life together before the Sparrow's dad went into the hospital. I despise the man still, and though I never knew him for most of his life, it became clear during that time that he was doing what he always did, destroyed people's lives and made it all about him. It may sound like a callous thing to say when the man was hospitalized after being found on the floor of his house by his mistress/girlfriend, but he was a subpar human being, and disease nor death will force me to feel the slightest sympathy for the man.
This point of this little trip down memory lane is to explain why all the closets got loaded with boxes. Why items were never sorted and put into place. Chaos reined because suddenly the Sparrow's sister was coming into town and needed to stay here. So we had to make our new house as presentable as possible. After that, the boxes and totes just stayed in the closets. Items we owned and clearly didn't miss have been sitting behind those doors for years now. Begging the question: Why do we have this stuff.
The clutter in the closets doesn't necessarily affect anything, but it just seemed to cause chaos outside in the rest of the room. We have furniture we just put into place in here because we had it and had nowhere for it. Shelves that don't really work. Items on the shelves that were put there to try to make it seem "fun" and lived in, but they actually are just collecting dust and looking messy. Pictures hung on the walls simply because there were either already nails there, or I was attempting to make it seem like I'd settled into the space by trying to make it look like my old offices in my old residences.
What needs to happen is that everything needs to be moved out of here. The stuff in the closet needs to go downstairs. The totes can either be sorted through or just stored down there, but they don't need to be taking up closet space in big, messy piles. I've got a dozen lava lamps on shelves, next to their boxes, taking up double the space. I don't have the proper setup to display some of them. Others come out from Halloween or Christmas and then just get thrown back on the shelves.
Another reason this whole thing has been dragged out is the wiring that needs to occur. The Comcast modem and the network setup for the whole house needs to go into the basement. As I've written before, every room has coax jacks on the walls (and in the case of the office, a set of three outlet boxes jury-rigged to the outside of the wall with phone jacks in them) that all need to be replaced with network jacks. I bought the cable three years ago, the outlet covers and all the rest of the stuff to do this but it has never happened. Wireless may be fine here and there, but I want my computers and the Apple TVs and such hardwired. It is just my personal preference.
And not a difficult task, just a matter of pulling through the network cables when pulling out the coax cables. It just hasn't happened yet.
The only headache part potentially will be getting the Comcast modem itself down stairs. Right now the coax for that comes straight through the drywall and the brick from outside into the office. There is a hole drilled into the cement foundation down there that a big bunch of cables go through for the old satellite dish that is still on the roof. I cut those cables outside a few years ago, but the remnants remain, caulked into the hole in the foundation. I could conceivably carve out the caulk and old cable, reconnect a new coax to the Comcast box outside and run it through myself. It really isn't that difficult of a thing.
Then the metal rack just needs to be mounted on the wall down there to hold the equipment up and it would be done. It all sounds so simple, and it is simple. But, come the end of the workday all motivation to do even the simplest things is lost.
I hate painting, but I can do it. There are some major drywall repairs that need to happen including removing the old school intercom on the wall. We tried doing this at the old house and our patchwork was less than stellar. But, we know the gist of it, perhaps we could do better now.
I was just complaining about money the other day, and it would cost some money to do all this. I desperately need a new desk as I am using an old Ikea kitchen table I've had since at least 2012 I think. I like a nice, big desk. I was looking at a desk that raises and lowers, where you pick out your own top. And Home Depot sells such desktops which I've priced out. We'd need some shelving, the Sparrow would also need a desk of his own. We'd both need office chairs, as mine has had a broken wheel for months and is barely functional.
It'd be good for us though to do this. I think we both need to feel the accomplishment of a job done. We have a lot of projects and things that only ever seem to get halfway accomplished. The yard especially and outside stuff never seems to ever get done. There's always yet another thing to do out there, not to mention the time it takes for plants to mature so our vision out there can be "complete".
I went through a couple boxes this morning. One had a bunch of old watches of my dad's, and one Fossil watch of mine I used to wear in the 1990s. It'd be fun to get them fixed and use them. I had some very, VERY old Charlie Brown/Peanuts paperbacks. Some of which are literally falling apart and decaying. I loved them as a child, but I am never going to read them again. The ones that are still in one piece can go to the secondhand store, the rest have already gone in the garbage.
I have this large packet of art prints my dad had for years. They are painted by Vietnam War vets, and depict scenes and such from the war. I do not think they were even legitimately sold and were once the property of the State Department or something. I have no idea how my dad got his hands on them. I doubt I'd ever get any framed, but perhaps they could be donated to a VFW or something? I am sure there is some value to them. But, the were first rotting in my parent's attic and now they've been in a box here for three years. The large manilla envelope they are in literally turning to particles.
The Sparrow and I get into ruts. Work is so demotivating, and it works its evil on both of us. So neither of us often can lift the other out of it. We are both content to just get on the couch after work and be sloths. I want to have motivation, and as I always say, unfortunately I am a morning person and my motivation often comes around 5:30 in the morning and dwindles by 11 AM. I don't think I need to force myself to change, just to make the time in those mornings to start. Even if I am just moving boxes and sorting stuff in the mornings for the time being. It's something.
I'll see what I can do today.
A funny side note I may have mentioned before. Our closet in the master bedroom is not really big enough for all our clothes and I have since we moved in talked about using the office closet for my stuff. The Sparrow has poo-pooed that thought more than once because of some crazy idea he has that we need to share a closet, otherwise it is saying something negative about our marriage. I openly mock him about this, telling him that if we used two different closets all our stuff is still in the same house.
It just makes more sense to split our clothes up. He has a drawer in the armoire filled with 50 or a hundred concert t-shirts. He can't even see everything he has because they are all just jammed in there. Not to mention, I *HATE* folding his laundry on laundry day because he puts all his t-shirts and work polos into draws, where as I consider this things items that should be on hangers. It takes so much more time for me to put the laundry away having to fold his stuff. If it was all on hangers it would legitimately save me five or ten minutes every Monday.
In fantasy world, the two-closet solution would only be temporary until we saved the funds to completely gut this side of the house and make a master bedroom suite, with a walk-in closet... Dare to dream.