Mood: Frustrated

Ever have one of those days were everything you attempt to do is tied to a dozen other things that have to be done first? My goal today was to clean my house. Not an impossible goal you say... HAH... that's what YOU think.

My family, and I love them dearly, come from a long line of packrats. We save everything. My mother was raised in the depression era. (Yes, I was a late in life baby!) And there was never a thing that would go to waste when I was a kid. Old and broken toys could be fixed, pants could have rips and tears mended and there was never any need to throw away clothes that you might have outgrown because surely to GOD you would hear of someone having a housefire and those poor little kids would be JUST the right size to wear what you'd saved from last year.

And what makes it worse, I married a man from another family of packrats. He saves everything too! But he's not alone, I swear to the heaven's that saving things are in both of our genetics. I have a walk in closet that you cannot walk into because of 'stuff'. My biggest thing, I would have to say is computer parts.

No, I'm not talking about printers and the accessories. I'm talking about the guts... hard drives, cd drives, cabled, network cards, video cards, extra memory, motherboards... I had this great idea that I could build my own computer. And I did... and then people realized that I could 'do things' with computers, so I end up getting everyone's handme down computers or the one's that are too slow for what they want them for, or the one's that they simply got tired of and replaced.

In my living room alone, I have three working laptops, and two desktop computers. Which is great when hubby and I are gaming online and one of the kids needs to use a computer for homework and such. Only, we have only one kid in school now, so that kind of limits the rest of them. OH... and I forgot about the old perfectly working Windows95 Pony sitting under the desk that does ... erm... nothing? Collect dust? And they're all pretty good at that.

I'm no Martha Stewart and I never claimed to be, but lately my house has fallen into a state beyond even my satisfaction. You can't even SEE the top of my dining room table because of the amounts of collected dragon statues (my collection) and my daughter's pottery that she made in pottery class last year. It used to sit on a bookshelf until I moved the bookshelf to the hallway with the intention of getting the books into a more out of the way location. HAH.

Yes, the book shelf is in the hallway, but now it collects anything and everything that someone has in their hand as they walk by. The books are still on the one in the living room, never having been moved... because it's the one in the hallways is waiting to be anchored to the wall, which is waiting on my husband to find his 'Bullseye' level/studfinder thingy to find the right place to anchor it. And the Bullseye is....somewhere in the living room? Or maybe it's on the porch? Lord knows it's not in the tool bag where it's SUPPOSED to be!

I need a storage shed. I have been to Lowes three times to look at one and every time I think I will get it, I talk myself out of it. Why? Because I know as well as I am sitting here typing it that the storage shed will be filled to the roof and I STILL won't have room in my house to move! See, that's what happened with mom and dad too.

They have two houses. One is an old log cabin built around the turn of the century (last century, not this one) and it has three bedrooms. The upstairs has is about 40 feet by 15 feet... so there's a LOT of room up there... and it has a 12 by 12 bedroom on the back... all the rooms are so full that you can walk up the stairs and step onto the landing. Forget about going INTO the upstairs bedrooms because you can't, there are too many boxes. And downstairs there's room for the back bedroom door to open... that's it.

So they have that house full. And the house that dad lives in (mom passed away in 2005) is still almost as crowded as it was before she passed. (He collects stuff too, only his is 'useful' stuff! Go figure!)

Dad built a 'barn' storage shed for his outdoors equipment like mowers and rototillers and such, and then they got a horse and a cow, so the storage area turned into a barn. Well, they were only going to use half the attic for hay and the rest for storage. Then the barn nearly fell down. So they build another 'workshop' for my dad... now it's so full of stuff that you can't run the radial arm saw without moving two truckloads of lumber to get to it. And then he built a 'woodshed' so we'd stop storing wood in his workshop. Now it's full of who knows what.

Are you seeing the pattern here? See why I hesitate to buy a storage building? Dad keeps saying that we can build one cheaper and he has the materials, but he's also been saying that for three years at least and none of us have had either the motivation or the desire to put for the effort to gather everything and build it.

*sighs*

So... frustration aside, what did I do this morning? Grab a cup of coffee and sit down at the computer. Think my house will get cleaned?

Yeah, right!!

Dragon Lady