Remaking a Home

So anyway...

(I hate it when I don't post in forever, but I have not posted in forever. Mea culpa.)

For seven years I have lived in squalor. Not the kind you find looking out the wrong side of the bus while traveling to a resort in Jamaica: the kind where, instead of the lush trees with occasional breaks for elaborately landscaped entryways to five-star playgrounds for those who have enough money to play (which inevitably means no one who is from this island), you stare, appalled, as your air conditioned coach rolls past miles and miles of one-room open-front shacks with corrugated tin roofs, yards littered with the detritus of lifetimes, and families--multi-generational families--living together within those shabby, barely-there walls, no protection whatsoever from the 100+ degree sun and the torrential rain.

Not that kind. I'm not strong enough to live that life. I'm barely strong enough to drive by it in an air conditioned coach: my heart breaks in two and I want to climb out and give away everything I own to someone who lives there to make their lives better, but I know I'd never do that.

No, I'm speaking in exaggerated terms about the absurdly cluttered, disgusting state of my tiny, two bedroom townhouse ever since my marriage.

When I bought this place, I made it cute and pretty: pictures and flowers, both real and dried, were everywhere. Little statues, David Winter cottages, glass knickknacks, scented candles, new furniture that picked up mauves and greens and made the whole house come together. I loved to sit at night, light candles, and just enjoy being in this space. But the thing is: I bought it with the idea that I would live here and that my children would live here, but that if such a time came when I ever got married again, of course my husband and I would move into a larger space.

I was married again a little over seven years ago, but we could not afford to move; thus, he moved in with me. And with all of his stuff. I do not begrudge him his stuff, but this little townhouse simply could not hold it all. We ended up with furniture on top of furniture. There were literally bookcases the entire way up the staircase. The living room was filled with piles of books, papers, dvd's, and way too much furniture. The dining room table was never devoid of stacks of crap, mostly because the front room, my little haven (in the old version of the house) for organizing files and mail and magazines and other things, had become utterly inaccessible: stuffed to the gills with furniture, boxes, a model train set-up, and so much random crap that we often didn't know there were places the cats had used as satellite litter boxes until months had gone by.

Our bedroom was so overfilled with furniture (two dressers, a wardrobe, a make-up table, and a king size bed with two night stands in a room that is roughly 12x12 and includes a six foot balcony window) and more clothing than could reasonably fit into the above that it was simply always a mess. Over time the was-white carpets became some kind of dingy, stained grey because there was no point in even trying to move enough crap to clean them. We replaced the carpets in the living room/dining room with laminate floors in an effort to curtail bad habits from the cats, but it didn't work: they destroyed the laminate too. It was all more and more of a disaster every year.

And every year I grew more and more depressed about it. I also have Seasonal Affective Disorder, so during the long winter months when I was forced to be stuck within those walls I would often become unbearably morose. But always the spring would come just in time and I would find myself rejuvenated, heart opened by the sight of crocuses breaking through the snow and the first robins, and I would allow the depression to slip silently away.

And then came this year, the year of the Polar Vortex, the year that winter would not end, when it shackled Chicago with icy chains that it would not release or even ease up for months. This was the year without any kind of even momentary thaw. It was the year with record cold and record snowfall. It was the year when the crocuses did not come until April. And when winter finally acquiesced to the planetary axis, the bitter cold was replaced by endless rain, and this became the year without sunshine. (It's true: as I write this, my deck has been waiting since April for sets of three consecutive dry days so contractors can refinish it. It has only happened once; we have had nearly constant rain.) There was no escape from the disgusting, depressing, overcrowded interior of my home. And to make things worse, my kitchen, which was in need of replacing on the day I bought the place, finally gave up the ghost at the start of the winter: the oven broke down and cabinets began peeling away from the walls.

It was in this way that 2014 became for me The Year I Remade My Home.

It began with my kitchen, which we gutted and had redone in March and April. As summer crept closer, though, I decided that the kitchen was not enough: I wanted to do it all, to attack the clutter and the junk piles and the excess furniture once and for all. So Dirk began to fill boxes and the garage began to fill up. Gradually, things started vanishing. When I threw away a large, decrepit chair, leaving only one recliner and no other chairs in the living room, it became clear that I meant business. The rest of the room emptied out. The front room also. And the stairway as well.

Eventually, we replaced the laminate floor with vinyl. (Take that, cats!) We replaced (finally) the worn, stained carpet upstairs. We built a new large closet to accommodate all of the clothing we have, and got rid of one of the dressers and a wardrobe in the process. We got rid of several very large wall units and bought new living room furniture. In the process, we have emptied the house of about 50% of the stuff that was in it, and nothing is not coming back unless it has a home. No more random piles.

It's still a mess. The workers are not finished, so we can't put everything away yet. But when it is done, we'll have a home we can be proud of and one that does not exaggerate by SAD, which could prove very important if next winter is anything like this one was. And all of that makes me happy.

What does not make me happy is that all of this has been extremely time consuming, and I have had no time to write. I need to rededicate myself, now that the job is heading toward its final stages. There is so very, very much to do...