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| My Childhood Home |
Writing is definitely my therapy. I've written a few blog posts recently that were really therapeutic and cathartic. The one about menopause is definitely in the top 5. So is my #3yearplan and the one about staying in the pool and finishing the race. The one about building my own personal brand as a writer is a personal favorite.
Which leads me to this post today where I am trying to analyze myself and why I don't care about having a nice big clean house.
I grew up in this house in the picture in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. It was two bedrooms for a long time until my parents added to it. I would say my mother was clean but not OCD clean. The house would get messy and then we would just clean up when it did. No big deal. The house was not big and we didn't live in a nice neighborhood but it was home and I had loving, although strict, parents. I was happy there and I don't remember ever wishing that I lived in a big fancy house. Sure, I admired beautiful homes like anybody else but it wasn't a life goal to have one. My parents did a good job of always working on it, updating it, replacing the roof, etc.
When I got older and I bought my own house with my then husband I was excited. We found the house on the edge of a neighborhood I had admired for many years. In fact, my mother used to admire this neighborhood too. The homes aren't huge, they are all pre-war and many of them are bungalow or ranch style homes. At first I had grandiose ideas of what I wanted to do with my 1940's style house, with original hardwood floors, like any first time home buyer. But as the years went by and we didn't do anything I started to care less and less about it. It's a four bedroom house and in the 17 years that I've lived here we only painted two rooms, one upstairs for my step-daughter when she lived here and one downstairs for the kid's nursery. Nothing else. What's worse, we never even fixed one of the upstairs bedrooms to use it. As you can imagine, 17 years have taken their toll on an already old house that has never been remodeled or kept up.
It's like I'm missing the gene that most people have, the one that gives them that desire to have a nice house. To make things even worse than my house being older and run down, I'm also messy. I tried to do research on why I don't really care about things like how my house looks and being messy. Most research says a messy house is a sign of depression, which I don't think I really have. It's also a sign of laziness, which, who am I kidding, is probably closer to the reason.
Then I found this article that states something I've often thought about myself but I don't really like to say aloud for fear of sounding arrogant or like I'm looking for an excuse. It says that "messy people aren't wrapped up in the status quo." Messy people are also more intellectual and like to spend time on reading and writing rather than cleaning. It feels like cleaning and keeping house is shallow and that our time can be better used doing something productive. This was a little bit of a consolation but I'm not 100% convinced that's the whole reason.
I also think about how much it would cost to really remodel this house correctly and the idea of putting myself in that kind of debt makes me sick. Then I get this dreaded feeling. Am I my father? My father never wanted to do anything that was going to put him and my mother in debt. To the point of making my mother angry and frustrated. When I was a little girl she wanted to buy a house in this neighborhood and he wouldn't have it. My sisters used to complain that he didn't believe in doing anything "normal" because "normal" people bought houses and had to make house payments.
However I know that I have to do something drastic soon. It has become a problem for me and something I want to overcome. It's something I struggle with and I've written about it in the past. I'm at a crossroads now. As part of my #3yearplan I need to decide what I'm going to do with this house. I receive weekly inquiries asking me if I'm interested in selling and I don't reply to any of them, even out of curiosity. I know that if I sell it can't be until after Seth has graduated from high school.
One thing that I have been wanting to do and I haven't done yet is to do an exercise of packing everything that means something to me into bins. Just the things that I would keep or want to save if my house was on fire . Everything else I will either give away or throw away. I feel like doing it that way would be so cleansing. And I feel like it would make it so much faster and easier to decide what I don't want to keep. I have seventeen years of accumulated junk.
The only question now is when? When am I going to start on this quest and I know the answer has to be SOON. I have to tackle it one room at a time so that I don't give myself an anxiety attack. I also have to approach it in the same manner that we approached packing up my father's house when he decided to rent it out.
So that is my goal as I head into summer. Pack up my house like it's about to sell or like it's on fire. I need to do something to clear my space and my head.
Which leads me to this post today where I am trying to analyze myself and why I don't care about having a nice big clean house.
I grew up in this house in the picture in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. It was two bedrooms for a long time until my parents added to it. I would say my mother was clean but not OCD clean. The house would get messy and then we would just clean up when it did. No big deal. The house was not big and we didn't live in a nice neighborhood but it was home and I had loving, although strict, parents. I was happy there and I don't remember ever wishing that I lived in a big fancy house. Sure, I admired beautiful homes like anybody else but it wasn't a life goal to have one. My parents did a good job of always working on it, updating it, replacing the roof, etc.
When I got older and I bought my own house with my then husband I was excited. We found the house on the edge of a neighborhood I had admired for many years. In fact, my mother used to admire this neighborhood too. The homes aren't huge, they are all pre-war and many of them are bungalow or ranch style homes. At first I had grandiose ideas of what I wanted to do with my 1940's style house, with original hardwood floors, like any first time home buyer. But as the years went by and we didn't do anything I started to care less and less about it. It's a four bedroom house and in the 17 years that I've lived here we only painted two rooms, one upstairs for my step-daughter when she lived here and one downstairs for the kid's nursery. Nothing else. What's worse, we never even fixed one of the upstairs bedrooms to use it. As you can imagine, 17 years have taken their toll on an already old house that has never been remodeled or kept up.
It's like I'm missing the gene that most people have, the one that gives them that desire to have a nice house. To make things even worse than my house being older and run down, I'm also messy. I tried to do research on why I don't really care about things like how my house looks and being messy. Most research says a messy house is a sign of depression, which I don't think I really have. It's also a sign of laziness, which, who am I kidding, is probably closer to the reason.
Then I found this article that states something I've often thought about myself but I don't really like to say aloud for fear of sounding arrogant or like I'm looking for an excuse. It says that "messy people aren't wrapped up in the status quo." Messy people are also more intellectual and like to spend time on reading and writing rather than cleaning. It feels like cleaning and keeping house is shallow and that our time can be better used doing something productive. This was a little bit of a consolation but I'm not 100% convinced that's the whole reason.
I also think about how much it would cost to really remodel this house correctly and the idea of putting myself in that kind of debt makes me sick. Then I get this dreaded feeling. Am I my father? My father never wanted to do anything that was going to put him and my mother in debt. To the point of making my mother angry and frustrated. When I was a little girl she wanted to buy a house in this neighborhood and he wouldn't have it. My sisters used to complain that he didn't believe in doing anything "normal" because "normal" people bought houses and had to make house payments.
However I know that I have to do something drastic soon. It has become a problem for me and something I want to overcome. It's something I struggle with and I've written about it in the past. I'm at a crossroads now. As part of my #3yearplan I need to decide what I'm going to do with this house. I receive weekly inquiries asking me if I'm interested in selling and I don't reply to any of them, even out of curiosity. I know that if I sell it can't be until after Seth has graduated from high school.
One thing that I have been wanting to do and I haven't done yet is to do an exercise of packing everything that means something to me into bins. Just the things that I would keep or want to save if my house was on fire . Everything else I will either give away or throw away. I feel like doing it that way would be so cleansing. And I feel like it would make it so much faster and easier to decide what I don't want to keep. I have seventeen years of accumulated junk.
The only question now is when? When am I going to start on this quest and I know the answer has to be SOON. I have to tackle it one room at a time so that I don't give myself an anxiety attack. I also have to approach it in the same manner that we approached packing up my father's house when he decided to rent it out.
So that is my goal as I head into summer. Pack up my house like it's about to sell or like it's on fire. I need to do something to clear my space and my head.
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