Nobody could possibly have it as bad as I do…
The House:
Inherited from recently deceased packrat mother-in-law who lived here for more than 20 years. House is a 36-year-old 4-level split consisting of five bedrooms, two living rooms, an eat-in kitchen, three bathrooms, various closets, a laundry/storage room and a two-car garage.
The Current Inhabitants:
A comic-collecting, video-game-playing husband who never had to clean up after himself.
The wife who’s too busy just trying to keep up on the dishes and keep the baby from ODing on kibble.
An 18-month old, Hurricane Bowen.
A miniature pinscher whose favourite pastimes are strewing garbage all over the kitchen and getting into the diaper pail.
Each of the aforementioned rooms and closets are a mess. Byron has only recently agreed to get rid of his mother’s things, so I’ve spent the last YEAR maneuvering around two household’s worth of “stuff”.
Three of the five bedrooms are actually used as such. Only one of the three is clean. It is the guest bedroom, never used, never opened. Bowen’s room and our room are both gawdawful messes. (Clean laundry sits patiently in baskets, whilst dirty laundry piles up all around, beds never made, toys strewn across the hall from Bowen’s room to ours… etc.)
The other two bedrooms are used as an office, and “Byron’s room” where he keeps all of his comics and half of his drumset. “Byron’s room” was his mother’s bedroom, and currently holds a majority of the stuff that needs to be cleared away, which is why only half of his drumset is in that room. The office is a room that gets used numerous times throughout the day, and is the biggest disgrace of all. Somewhere around 50 Coke cans are stacked on one side of the desk. I count four empty cigarette packs (and accompanying cellophane wrappers) one 32 oz McD’s cup, one 20 oz. styrofoam Kum&Go coffee cup, one refillable gas station coffee mug, three glasses, two cereal bowls, one ice cream dish, one half-full box of Goldfish crackers, two packs worth of Big Red gum wrappers, and countless bits of scratch paper. (Hey, there’s my new car registration!)
That’s just the DESK… I’m not even going to tell you about the rest of the room (Hurricane Bowen, anyone?)
The other half of Byron’s drumset is down in the downstairs living room, which currently is the holding place for boxes of clothes that Bowen can no longer wear/can’t wear yet/can’t wear at all because he’s not a girl. In addition to that, there are all the knicknacks, books, toys, linens and other junk that I finally started sifting through in a rage to turn my house from a flea market into an actual domicile. Laundry room and garage? Not worth getting into.
Suffice it to say, this house MAY be livable before Bowen graduates high school. After that, we’ll still need to redecorate… this house is more seventies than disco.
Veni, Vidi, Visa … I came, I saw, I bought.
