✯Sincerely, Me✯

☯LivingWithMyself☯
2016-04-09 15:13:25 (UTC)

Buried

Dear Reader,

I’ve been meaning to talk about this for awhile now.

It’s just that, I had always thought things were fine up until a few months ago when I started helping with renovating the house.

My family are hoarders.

Now, I know what you’re thinking...
“How did this not occur to you earlier?”

Because, my family’s problem doesn’t mirror textbook examples.

Our house consists of three bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2 living rooms, 1 Kitchen, and 3 porches.
It may sound big, but it isn’t. It’s all one floor. These rooms are decent sized, but nothing big.
All of the rooms are close together. 2 of the rooms are add-ons to the original structure. The second bathroom doubles as the laundry room.
5 people live here. My grandparents, and myself, and my 2 brothers.

We have 3 storage buildings on our property,
and 1 tanning bed that became another storage building.


None of the furniture in this house matches.
None of the space is used efficiently.

The cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom are so full of things we don’t use anymore,
That we don’t have space for things we DO use.
So the things we DO use are just all over the countertops.. And surfaces.


She avoids throwing things away, decluttering things, and donating things.
Things that are just plain garbage, and things that have no purpose whatsoever.

The buildings and the back porch are too full of things like this, that we can’t fit anything we actually need inside them.


We recently redid her bedroom.
She made her furniture by hand, and she made it all smaller than what she had before.
So, she doesn’t have space to put her junk in her room anymore,
So guess where it is now.
In our bedrooms.

You know how normal people need closet space?
You know, for things you just don’t have room for in your room.
I don’t have closet space.
Guess what’s in mine and my brothers closet?
Her things.
I’ve had three garbage bags that are SO full of clothes I don’t wear, and that I outgrew, that they’re ripping. They’ve been in my closet for years, and I’ve tried to get her to take them to donate them.
I KNOW what’s in them.
I KNOW I don’t need any of it anymore.
I just want it gone.

She still says she’s looking through them before we donate them.
She can look through them all she fucking likes and waste our time,

Because I don’t care what she says. It’s all going.


I remember once,
I decided I was going to get rid of a bunch of things I just don’t need anymore.
I was deep cleaning my room, and all of the garbage was in my way, and taking up space for things I actually needed.
So, I got a big ass garbage bag, and I started packing.

She complained about it all day long,
And watched me for a short while as I put some things in it,
Even made me take some things out and SHOW her what I was throwing away,
To be sure I wasn’t throwing away anything “good.”

I finally got the bag on the back porch, and it was headed to the bins the next day.

You know what happened?
Fast forward a week or two,
I found a giant bottle of strawberry lotion sitting on the sink in the second bathroom.
It WAS my lotion, but I threw it away IN that bag of stuff I was tossing.
I threw it away because it was just too greasy and it didn’t smell very good.

I started noticing more and more things that I thought I had thrown away.

She literally got the bag off the porch, went through it and took things that she thought that I might still need after I clearly didn’t, and put it back in my room, or somewhere else.

I did this again one time, and I remember her saying.
“Don’t tie the bag, because I’m going to look through it before you throw it away.”

I keep plastic shopping bags hanging up in my room for trash.
And each time they get full, and I carry them out to the trash can in the kitchen, she stares at the bag looking to see what’s inside it, and sometimes asks what something is in it.
Or comments about how I accumulate a lot of trash, or throw things away a lot.


My grandparents have done a lot of their own construction work on their house.
They rarely ever had to hire professionals.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being handy and self-reliant...
But.. the tools are everywhere.
There’s tools in the second living room, which we call the TV room.
There’s tools in the laundry room....
Countless tool boxes, cabinets.. shelves... filled to the brim of tools.
One of the storage buildings are filled with tools.
They have tools in their bedroom.
Tools in the kitchen.


It’s good to have tools... except half of them probably have only been used once, or not at all.
They buy them thinking they’ll use them for a future project that they end up never doing...
And then they pile up somewhere.


She has a lot of projects that she has in mind.
I’m expected to help.
I wouldn’t mind helping if it wasn’t for her tendencies with projects.

She has cycles with projects.
She’ll “fix” a room.

She won’t buy any new furniture..
She’ll use the broken/dysfunctional furniture we have.
She’ll make things that AREN’T furniture into furniture.
She’ll nail pieces of wood together and make tacky cabinets and things, put them into a room.

None of it is functional whatsoever, and the space isn’t efficiently used.
The room is still fucking ugly, and it ends up getting piled up with MORE shit she won’t throw away.

And half the time the projects that she starts don’t even get finished!


She’s finally come to the realization that she needs to throw things away.

The projects she’s wanting to do, simply can’t be done until we’ve cleared out all of the junk.
There’s no way around it.

She’s found a company that’ll let us rent some dumpsters for 10 days, and they’ll haul whatever we fill them with off. There’s another company that will pick up furniture or wood that can be reused or upcycled.

It’s EXACTLY what we need.


The back porch, and the tv room are FULL of things that just need to fucking GO.

The TV room can’t be used because it’s so full of things.

We can’t go any further with the projects, until we get the dumpsters, and clear out all of the shit that’s in the way.

And yet, she’s hasn’t even called to get them, and she STILL tries to work AROUND the mess...
Making MORE of a mess!


It’s infuriating!

Here’s something that happened today.

She talked all morning long how she needed to get busy working on the TV room.
She sat in the living room ALL day, and decides in the evening to start working.

There’s this book shelf in the tv room.
Full of books and VHS tapes.
She decides, even though we have NO room for the books,
To unpack them from the shelf.

This shelf is long and narrow and was supposed to stand up straight.
That wasn’t good enough for her.
She altered the absolute fuck out of this shelf.

She turned it on it’s side, put legs on it.. Nailed another shelf thing to it on the back...
Just fucked it up. Wasted SO much space in the Tv room.
Piled it with more junk we didn’t need.

So, as we unpacked the shelf,
She realized that she didn’t even assemble it right to begin with.

Want to know why she wanted to unpack the books?
Because she wanted to take all of the alterations off,
AND STAND IT UP LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ORIGINALLY.

But because it wasn’t even assembled right,
Meant we’d have to take EVERYTHING apart.

She started going on about how we could just bash it all apart and assemble it correctly....
By sundown.

We started at like 5 o’clock.
There was no way in hell.

She asked if I thought we could do it,
To which I responded, “I don’t know.”

And she said in a hateful ‘agree with me’ tone:
“Yes, we can.”

So, by some miracle, she decided we should just go to Big Lots,
And look at the book shelves they had.
They had one that was perfect, and it was a steal.
She bought it, and I was thinking “Yaaay, she’s going to get rid of the Frankenshelf and have a normal, modern piece of furniture.”

Nope.
I asked what she was going to do with it, and she told me she has “plans” for it.

I should have known.


Instead of throwing things that need to just be tossed, and replaced..
She’ll find a “use” for it.
I’ve noticed that all the things we’ve planned on tossing,
She’s slowly finding more and more “uses” out of them.

The worst part is,
She complains ALL the time, about how disgusting and ugly her house is.
And she blames it ALL on us.

Sure, we make regular messes etc. but that’s NORMAL.
The reason her house is so ugly, is because of all of the above.

About a year or two ago, I asked grandma if WE could redo my bedroom.

I had my brother’s old room, which was painted white and navy blue stripes.
And it had an ugly beach boarder at the ceiling.
I had white hand-me down furniture from my cousin for years.
I’d run out of space, and I wanted my room painted purple. I


After it took some persuading, she finally agreed.

Except, she didn’t let me make any of the decisions.


I asked her countless times, to wait until I was home from school,
So that I could go to town with her to pick out the colors, and the furniture.

She didn’t.

She went to town herself, and picked a color pallette with different shades of purple on it.

We were at the table eating dinner, and she was showing me the shades,
And I picked one. It was a pastel shade. I wanted a lighter color so the room would be so dark.

SHE didn’t like the color I chose, and started trying to convince me to pick the one SHE liked.
And finally, I realized she wasn’t going to buy the color I wanted.
So, I just agreed to the one she wanted.

She painted my room while I was at school too,
Even though I asked for her to wait so I could help.

I asked if she’d peel the beach border at the top off, because I didn’t like it.
She didn’t, because she liked it.


She didn’t even paint it that good.
She didn’t paint cleanly.
She didn’t even paint the door or the closet doors...

She went to town, and picked out a three piece bedroom set.

This part, will always make me angry.

She picked out furniture, that is way too big for my room.


The bedroom suit came with a long ass vanity mirror/storage thing.
And a dresser, and a king size bed frame.

Here’s the issues.

First of all,
I didn’t need the vanity mirror.

She only bought it because she thought I’d use it to apply make-up.
The storage shelves in it are the most dysfunctional I have EVER seen.
They’re either too deep, too narrow, too shallow..
They’re either too full or too empty because that’s how hard it is to store things in them.

The dresser has the same problems.


I love the bed so much,
But here’s the problem.
It came with a queen size mattress, on a king size frame!
The frame sticks out about a foot away from the mattress on the end.


The furniture, is way too big for my room, like I said.
It can only fit in one, cramped way.
If I ever wanted to change it around, I couldn’t.
Because there’s simply no fucking room to do it.

I don’t have space for anything.
I have too much stuff, not enough storage..


It’s all this orangey shade of brown the clashes so fucking badly against the shitty shade of purple.


With my old bedroom suit,
I had a desk.
I used it every single day.
She knew this.
I was ALWAYS sitting at it.
I used it for my art, my homework, and to sit at while I was on my laptop.

THIS was a reason WHY I needed to go with her,
So I could have chosen a bedroom suit with a fucking desk.

Because now.. I have to sit on my bed to do everything.
And it fucks with my back.

And I’ve explained the desk part before,
And she goes “Just sit at the vanity”

Here’s why I can’t.
It’s a solid rectangle.. With drawers..
I HAVE to be able to put my legs under my desk to work..
Leaning over to reach the keyboard etc. fucks with my back even MORE.


I’ve asked her if we could repaint my room a different color,
And she gave me the most hateful look ever..
I told her that I’d do it myself, so she wouldn’t have to do it.


I’ve tried decorating my room little by little.. Trying to make it a little more comfortable.

I spend 95% of my time in my room.
This is my fucking space.

And when I get a job, and get my own money..
This room will be my first interior design project.

And when I’m older, and have my own place...
It’s NEVER going to be like hers.


Sincerely,
Shovel




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