Back into the closet. Well, maybe you guessed it from this heading. If you're following my blog, you'll know that I (sometimes we) spent the entire weekend cleaning out the bedroom closet. Today we had cleaners over because we're getting ready to show the house early to our neighbor's realtor, since our neighbor wants to buy our house (but so far hasn't offered us anything for it). I got home expecting to see a sparkling, neat house, as my husband had called me several times during the day to ask about the disposition of some items. The girls weren't finished. Yes, our house was so dirty—despite being professionally cleaned two weeks ago by a different company—that the girls spent five hours at our house yesterday and still weren't done. That was embarrassing but understandable, because since we started clearing the house out, I have stopped trying to clean, too. But later I went into our closet, and maybe you can guess what I saw. Yes, indeed, the closet that I spent two days cleaning out was full of boxes. He did it again. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but finally I pointed out that I had repeatedly asked him not to fill up places that we had already cleared out, because the end effect was that we weren't making any progress, and even if we were, we would feel like we weren't. We ended up having a big fight (unusual for us), during which he accused me of saying the same things all the time, and I told him that was because I thought if I said them enough times he might listen. That sounds horrible, I know, but he also has a memory problem, so it's hard to know when I have to repeat myself. Then he pretty much admitted to me that if I asked him to do something, he was not going to do it; I had already suspected this was going on. Since he also refuses most of the time to have a calm talk about what our next steps should be, and he isn't going to do what I ask him to do, I have to admit to being totally stymied.

Do I just let him work at whatever, even though it may not make sense at the time and may create more mess? For example, right now I am working on removing clutter, but he has decided to start removing furniture from the house, sometimes creating more clutter. He has taken months to motivate to work at all, so I feel like if I say nothing, he will just relapse into inactivity.

Author: whatmeread. Posted on August 25, 2016. Categories: hoarding, moving. Tags: junk, moving, packing. 6 comments.

Back into the Closet — Out of the Closet
This weekend's project was to clear out our bedroom closet. The state this closet was in was as much my fault as my husband's. We have far too many things in it. But it also got out of hand because of my husband's propensity for organization run amok. We don't have any linen closets. When I was single, I kept my sheets on the top closet shelf and the toilet paper in the bathroom cabinet. After my husband moved in, the bathroom cabinets got out of control and he installed shoe racks on the closet shelves. One on the left was handy because it actually held shoes, but the one on the right made it impossible to store sheets or anything else. The top shelf became the repository for toilet paper and tissues, which my husband buys in bulk—buying in bulk being one of our problems. Then Wayne put a rack of shelves at the back of the closet, and they became stuffed with sheets and towels. Eventually we ran out of room, and so many things were on the floor that I kept tripping every time I went in. On Saturday I removed everything from the top shelves and the floor. It took most of the day to sort through everything, packing items, putting donations in a bag for Goodwill, or throwing things out.