My home is a mess

donnajt

donnajt wrote: »

Hi Messies & Happy New Year, sorry haven't been around for ages but have a week off and desperately need to straighten my house!!! Tonight I am going to take my tree down....

Tree down and living room decluttered....kitchen in the morning

sashanut

Hi all:j

Many thanks for the welcome folks - I think I may well be here for the long haul:rotfl:

Popping on to update because I know this will help me - feeling I have report some progress now! BTW no I won't keep the doll for my daughter - she was never a doll type & although I never was either - I now have a vast collection of dolls so she can choose one of those if she feels the need:eek:

OK so this morning I have been in the room of doom for about an hour. Gosh that was scary. After clearing a space yesterday, I also vacced the carpet where exposed & cleaned a couple of windows, it already looked better. But when I move something, a dangerous clothes avalanche descends & makes it look MUCH worse. Then I lost my roll of bin bags in the chaos, that didn't help either.

So far I found them again & filled 5 for the CS, ready to go. Luckily one of our local CS collects if you have 6 bags - I have the guy on speed dial. Every time he comes, he says 'is that it now?'.......I haven't even scratched the surface:D

Have also 2 suitcases full of stuff for eBay, hate selling on there but MSE kicks in & I think I should really sell it...now if only I could stop buying more carp on there, I'd be sorted!

I do find it really difficult to part with things, I think due to my upbringing (very poor, father a foreign POW). Having visited my fathers' country, I can see why they never throw anything away, nothing much seems to have changed since he left 70 years ago....

donnajt

Job of the day...dye my hair...goodbye greys

Buffythedebtslayer

We got a letter before Christmas from the Gas people who want to come and move the gas meter outside.

It said they would come in the new year. You can guess right? they came this morning!!!!

I am half way through a loft clear out. Which to be fair is mostly up stairs, they had to go into the conservatory which is just a dreadful mess - full of Charity shop bin liners and recycling bags of paper plus too much furniture. It was horrible. I wanted to cry. my poor Mum. She had to stand there whilst he examined out gas pipes and what not.

We were online chatting to my sister yesterday - Mum had mentioned about the gas people and my sister joked that she hated people coming round to the house and Mum said she was the same, ha ha etc.

After finished we Mum was talking about her old friend,(I would say best mate but that is a whole other story!) she has never been to our new house (of ten years) because Mum is so ashamed of it and thinks it is awful.

Now it isn't. we are clean, fairly organised and a little cluttered. In fact in the living room, as I sit here it looks fairly tidy....aside from the table, we used to leave stuff on the floor but with the dogs! The rooms up stairs are a mess. totally filled with decisions Mum and I won't make. paperwork, stuff, bits. odd socks! all sorts of stuff.

Just made me so sad to think that Mum, even tho (loft clearance aside) downstairs is quite respectable she is ashamed of the home we have. It is true that since Dad died she and I don't feel at home here, our old house was lovely, when ever I came home it was welcoming, tidy etc. My rented homes - I always kept them tidy. However here we don't seem to care.

Personally when I have the place to myself I have had some good times here and do get it cleared up and when Mum returns it looks good for a while. Gradually though we fall back into habits...piles of crap, things stuffed in cupboards.

And then we have the next problem, Mum's answer is to cupboard stuff. Mine is to rip everything out and start again. this really stresses Mum out and her method really stresses me out!!

Any how horrible start to the day.

Oh GOD I WANT THIS BLOODY HOUSE SORTED OUT!!!

Emm-in-a-pickle

Hi Messies!
DonnaJT, I know nobody seems to stick to it any more, but traditionally the tree shouldn`t come down till Jan 6th....
Grousescot - your story about making space for the piano has made me think.(Oh dear, I`m Thinking again...) The whole point about de-cluttering for me is not just throwing stuff out for the sake of it, but making space for the things you DO want, and space so you can find & use stuff easily.
Sashanut, I`m with you on the up-bringing thing. My parents weren`t poor, but they`d both seen & worked with enough poverty to make them careful - having `the latest` fashions or gadgets was their idea of foolishness, and buying stuff on credit was what other people did. Make do & mend, keep anything that might eventually be useful, and manage without an item until you could comfortably pay cash for it...that`s how they lived.
Bearcub, even in a small house, if you can identify the separate paper mountains, and reasons for having them, it`s not so bad. My mission to declutter the paper carp from this house is scarey because it`s all muddled together, decades` worth of it, and all over the place - AND with more incoming all the time!

I am now going to the paper skip with 3 sacks. I have found and sorted another pile of stuff to shred later, and a shopping bag of various stuff to go to DD`s, but not going there today as I`m lurgied again & don`t want to take my germs near little ones..
Drags self off to paper skip...

hopefulmoneysaver94

That smells gone Thank you all for suggestions , Just sent OH out to get a couple more clear boxes for clothes (I find them everywhere!!) and he came back with a horse feed tub, bless him. do all men not know what there doing? or is it just mine?:rotfl:


Been told by mother that i can clear the loft out in the old house for the new renters to come in and put it all on Ebay once she's looked through it all (She's still got art work and things nan gave to her when she died up there) and i can have half of what i get for everything!! All goes in my saving pot towards my trip to france

sonastin

Happy New Year to one and all. Nice to see so many new messies joining us. I too would like to offer my thanks to my fellow messies for their support in 2012. OH might well have been buried under the patio if I couldn't come hear and moan about him! Although I do have to announce that... drum roll please... he has cleaned the kitchen!!!!

Night before last (i.e. going-back-to-work eve) he sent me to bed early so that I was ready for my early start and then cleared up the kitchen and mopped the floor. OK so it was because he was sticking to it but that's his fault for not wearing slippers! We still haven't tackled the kitchen windows yet. I'm torn between the fact that I'll have to climb on the worktop to reach (and my mum fell off hers and knocked herself out a few years ago doing that!) and the knowledge that its a new window and I really should get into the habit of taking care of it. OH keeps doing bits of the frame to check that the discolouration will come off but never quite goes the whole way to do it all!

Still have some major league de-messying to do in the rest of the house too. Made all the more urgent by the demise of the bookshelves in the living room. My cousin came over for dinner and went to get a bottle of wine off the shelf - it was only after pulling it out that she realised it was the only thing propping up the shelf full of tool catalogues above! Tool catalogues are now in a "neat" pile on the floor and we are trying to work out if a) there is anything useful to be done with this (my) bookshelf and b) if OH's bookshelf will fit into the same space. New living room will hopefully be habitable in the next couple of months so I'm betting we can procrastinate over this decision until then! Still haven't worked out who's furniture is going into the new room yet either. Chairs/sofas & dining table have been sorted but side tables, drawer units, bookshelves etc are still open to debate. I'm struggling to picture both the new room and what we'll have left in the one we're using now so I'll wait until we're done before I tell OH what I think!

Emm - have you considered getting a garden incinerator for the paper? OH inherited one from his friend and now we don't bother with the shredding. All waste paper goes into a bin and when that's overflowing, OH takes it outside and burns it. Much quicker than spending hours in front of the shredder and then trips to the recycling. I did wonder if maybe it wouldn't be a good idea in your "natural" garden but lets face it, nothing that lives outdoors will burn in this weather!

Oh well. Back to work I suppose. I'm actually tempted to demessy my desk this afternoon after all this inspiration!

bearcub

Afternoon Messies.

Sashanut, shame about the avalanche (we've had a couple of real landslides here recently), but at least you won! Sounds as if you're doing really well with all the sorting. Never used ebay, wouldn't trust it, but I know some people find it useful.

Buffy, I sympathise with you over your mum's attitude. My Mum moved here about 15 months ago - from a mid-terrace suburban house with appallingly noisy and nasty neighbours, to a detached bungalow in the country, just across the road from us. Although she's settled in quite well now, she still occasionally makes a comment that implies "It wasn't like this in my old house". It could be that the road is too quiet (after all the tears over the aforementioned neighbours!), there's too much water in the garden (I wonder why that is!), the house is falling to pieces - it's not, it's in very good nick. It's really tough, I know, but I suspect that your mum's never going to accept the situation, but it's your life, too, so carry on and sort. If you're more epaceful then maybe, just maybe, soem of it will spill over onto your mum. Meanwhile, big hugs.

hopefulmoneysaver94 wrote: »

Just sent OH out to get a couple more clear boxes for clothes (I find them everywhere!!) and he came back with a horse feed tub, bless him. do all men not know what there doing? or is it just mine?:rotfl:

What?! How on earth could he get that wrong, HopefulMS? The tub may do for laundry, but storing clothes?? :rotfl: I'm glad the spray worked - or your nose has forgotten the smell!

Donnajt, I've taken down most of our decorations, too, but the tree will stay until Saturday.

It sounds as if your house is progressing well, sonastin, but it must seem like forever to you. Pity about the bookcase, but at least it's pushed you into doing something about it.

Now, Emms, you go carefully with all that thinking! I know, very cheeky of me.

Another very dull day, but it's mild and it's not raining - always a bonus. Compared to those whose houses have been flooded, it minimal, but I found that the paint is bubbling on the outside wall (not the wall outside, if you get my drift) of this room (the second bedroom), and the wall behind my chest of drawers in our bedroom is black with mould. We intend to re-decorate throughout this year, but something major needs doing about the damp. Basically, it's too much rain, and heavy clay that doesn't allow the water to drain away.

Have put away dried washing, and sorted and emptied waste bins. I need to repair a couple of pairs of gloves before putting in the wash. They're riding gloves that I wear when I'm mucking out to stop callouses on my hands, and they're just sitting on my bedside table, waiting. Must clean that window, too.

penguingirl

Thanks for the welcome guys- I'm glad I'm not the only one with an aversion to putting away the clothes! My cat likes to think that the airer is his personal hiding cave (handily by the radiator).

My mum (who is much messier and more of a hoarder than me) is feeling pleased with me, as 4.5 years after I moved out I went back to her house and did some ruthless sorting out- some of the stuff hadn't been unpacked since I moved out of University. I ended up with about 4 bags for the charity shop, 2 bags of rags and 1 bin bag- and I only sneaked a few things back into my own house (and they were things like expensive dresses that I might wear again). I still have lots of clutter to sort out there, but at least the wardrobes are done and we had a bit of a giggle at some of the things I wore (and I felt miserable about how small they were!)

Hope the new year is going well and no one is feeling too overwhelming. I'm gathering the energy to empty the dishwasher and I will tackle the Christmas decorations tomorrow.

hopefulmoneysaver94

penguingirl Our wardrobe has been taken over by the two cats, and the kitten thinks she can take over the clothes horse by showing us how good of a climbing frame it is!! So we've literally got no place to hang clothes

Using the tub that OH brought for clean socks and underwear (YES!! i found a decent use for it other than a laundry basket ) And as i went round to my mothers last night, she gave me load of storage boxes (the clear ones i was talking about!! ) So I think we're good for now, Just got the paper work to apply for a bigger place so hopefully, this year will be good