Keeping House - Chapter Three

I'm a little late on this!  I don't know where the week went!  As it is I am typing this in the wee hours of the morning because this is the only time I think I can carve out this weekend!  I feel so rattled most of the time with all my busyness.  It is hard to sit down and write something reflective.

Anyway, since I read this chapter last Sunday evening, I think I'll just respond to Willa's questions in her post.   Maybe this will help me stay on topic.

1)  Dream houses:

In many ways the house I live in is a sort of my dream house.  We renovated the kitchen and basement and we decorated it with the help of an interior decorator.  I always wanted to be able to do that!  I'm lacking in the decorating department.  And I have a big screen porch; something I've always wanted.  We have garage; something I never actually thought about but now that we have one, I find it invaluable.  One sad thing I've found, as I have moved closer to my house ideals as I've gotten older, is that nothing is ever perfect!  Things always need improvement and the things one dreams about in one's youth, may or may not be satisfactory once you get them.  It feels shameful to state that, like I'm very ungrateful.  There might be an element of that - lack of gratitude.  I think it is my own personal response to all the materialism and the focus on thinking that things like having a HGTV home brings actual happiness.  Not!

Even though there are many wonderful things about my house, there are many irritating things as well.  I guess familiarity breeds contempt.  For instance, after putting the screen porch, we enjoyed one glorious summer with it.  Then the bulldozers came and devastated the orchards behind our house.  They began to build mcmansions (the most pretentious one's I've ever seen!) behind our house.  Not only was the noise of construction off putting enough to make sitting on the screen porch unpleasant, but the red clay dust raised by it all, constantly coated everything, including the pretty porch furniture which became permantently stained by it.  I didn't think to run out and get covers for it until too late.  That annoyance lasted a good two years, then we got stinkbugs.  So even though I've got this lovely porch, it has been problematic.  Also screen porches are really another room to clean!  I hadn't realized that it takes effort to keep it up looking nicely. Why that wouldn't occur to me. . . well, I don't think along those lines very naturally.

Here's another example.  Even though my house is big I don't seem to be very good at figuring out how to store things in a practical way.  I've never found a good place to store thick comforters for instance.  I sheepishly admit they are stacked in my upstairs hall right now, on a box of stuff filled with. . . I don't know what.  I think when Hannah last cleaned her room (a year ago?) she took a big box and put a lot of cast off stuff in it that I don't quite know what to do with.  She pushed that big box out into the hallway where is has since become the place where the comforters are stored.  The comforters used to be on my closet floor but the cats would always sleep on them.  So when you'd go to use one for an especially cold night or when a guest was visiting, there'd be cat hair all over it.  That kind of thing stymies me for years. . .

This gets me to longing again for some expert help.  I dream that someone who has a gift for organization comes to my house and just gives me directives on how to handle all this sort of thing.  I'd love to just follow directions and not have to think about it!  I do think the idea of the dream house, and the habit I formed long ago of daydreaming about what the perfect house would be like, does make me discontent.  Right now, I am very discontent about where we are located because of the big ugly housing development.  Now, I dream I live on a farm.  I want to raise chickens but my property is too small.  This is completely unrealistic practically speaking, but that is my romantic daydream of country living.  So I am a malcontent!  It is actually good to realize this, so I can work on changing my attitude.

2)  The structure of a house:

The very two examples that Willa points out here from the book are exactly two issues I have with my house!  When we were renovating the kitchen/family room, we deliberately combined the two rooms.  When we moved in the kitchen was this awkward boxy room.  We took down the wall between the kitchen and family room hoping to create a sense of an old fashioned great kitchen.  I think we did a pretty good job BUT we do have the big screen TV on the wall.  I would not let it go above the fire place though.  I wanted a tradition mantle set up.  So we put the big TV on the wall opposite the sliding door to the screen porch.  My desk is right at the center of the kitchen family room combo.  This is good and bad.  This room really is the center of our home, but it means that I am working in the midst of lots of chaos and noise.  I get so I hate the noise and images pouring out of the TV when I'm trying to focus.  It is hard to blog unless I'm up early before anyone else (the case right now!) or if I want to order presents on line (the children seem to be uncanny in their ability to sense this!) or if I want to read a blog that might not be appropriate for a 10 year old girl (last night I was trying to read a blog about gay marriage and she came over and wanted to know what I was reading.  I just didn't want to have to address that quite yet!).  Sometimes I want to see a video someone has posted but I'm afraid that it will contain language inappropriate or will conflict with the noise from the TV.   For instance, I wanted to watch a clip from John Stewart's show yesterday and did so very furtively!    So there's a lack of privacy in my work space that annoys me.  At the same time, things are very conveniently placed because we do most of our academic stuff here at the kitchen table.

The other thing is our neighborhood.  We basically live on a cul de sac off a narrow, windy, very busy road.  That means that we can't get anywhere unless we drive.  I've never lived anywhere like this before.  I grew up in a small city where we could walk or take a bus to anywhere! It was very freeing, now that I look back on it.  When I lived on my own, I lived in Baltimore and again could walk or take a bus anywhere.  When we first married, we lived in Arlington, which is like a city.  From our apartment and then later our townhouse, I could walk to the grocery store, the library, the subway station, restaurants, a big shopping mall.  When we bought a house, we bought it in Vienna, very near the metro.  For ten years, Rick walked to the subway to get to work.  I had to drive to the grocery store, but we could walk to the public school (where Hannah attended Kindergarten and First grade), to the bike path, to a playground, to the pool in the summer, to a 7-11 and a MacDonalds, plus there were lots of kids in the neighborhood so we were always walking to playdates.  When we moved to this house, I was very pregnant with my 5th child.  Our other house was small and I simply couldn't figure out how to fit a new dresser for the new baby into our already overcrowded situation!  So we were looking for 3 things in a house:  1) another bedroom 2) easy access for Rick to drive to work (because now we were richer and could afford two cars) 3) a fireplace or a woodstove.  This current house met all three criteria, plus it had the gorgeous pond and orchards in the back yard.  It also was closer to all our homeschooling friends.  So we moved.  However, I really miss being able to get places without having to get into a car.  I think this is one thing I dislike about the suburbs.  I either want to be really out in country where I can enjoy privacy and nature and know that the price I have to pay is having to drive longer distances.  Or I'd like to be right in the thick of things, knowing the price I pay for easy access and convenience is giving up country life.  What I don't like about where I am now is that I neither have the privacy nor the easy access.  See?  I'm always dissatisfied!  Not good.  No wonder I am so begrudging about this housekeeping stuff!

3)  The size of our house:

We moved to get a bigger house for our growing family.  I like the size of our house.  With the two oldest gone off to college, it feels a bit empty.  However, I like that I can host exchange students pretty easily.  I like that I can have guests stay over night.  I like that when my aunt needed care, she could move into our house pretty easily.  I do wish the bedrooms were configured a little differently.  I'd rather have slightly smaller bedrooms so that we could have one more upstairs.  But really it is not much of a problem.

I'm running out of time.  I have to get breakfast and get my aunt up.  And then we have to bundle up warmly for Becky is marching in a Christmas parade today.  I'm dragging Sean along with me because I don't want him spending another morning idling time away.  We have to be at the parade grounds by 9:20 and the town is over 30 minutes away.  Hopefully, I'll be able to continue this at some point later today.

****************************************

Back again!  Had a great time at the parade, came home relaxed for a couple hours, did a little Christmas shopping and got Italian carry out for dinner.  Okay, back to this blog post!

4)  Beauty in the Home:

I think my house is pretty.  it is a big white colonial with big colonial windows.  It is set back from the street and has a pretty garden in front.  I like my brightly colored walls.  I like old fashioned, country and that's what I've got.  My interior decorator was great.  I told her what I liked and she was really intuitive about picking up on everything.  Basically, I wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the home I grew up in.  The color of my living walls is the same color my sister painted my parents living room walls.  I always dreamed that if I ever got a separate dining room, I'd decorate it like my mom decorated our dining room growing up because as a child I loved to read at the dining room table when the room as quiet and empty.  I loved the rose wallpaper and the pretty curtains.  So when we moved to this house, voila!  I had a separate dining room and that's exactly how I decorated it.  I like pretty things.  However, because I am such a clutterer that house very seldom looks its best.  Instead every surface becomes piles of debris.  That feels ungrateful too, because here I am blessed with something pretty but I don't take pains to keep it that way.  Boy, this book is acting like an examination of conscience for me!

5)  Space and How To Use It

I've already alluded to this, I think.  I don't use space well at all.  I am often quite flummoxed by how to be more efficient.  I truly seem to lack common sense in this area.  However, I am pleased with some things.  For one thing, one reason why I liked this house better than the others we looked at when we were shopping for a new home, was that it had a living room and dining room that could be closed off.  I am not a big fan of open floor plans.  I like being able to into a room and shut the door.  So we have french doors on our living room entrance and another french door between the kitchen and the dining room.  I also love our study, which is now Aunt Jackie's bedroom.  One whole wall is books shelves.  I love having a huge area for books!  It isn't even enough.  We have books in every room, but that is book central.

I'd like to get a closet organizer for our master bedroom closet.  Right now it just has a bar for clothes to hang on that runs around it perimeter and then a high shelf above that.  Right now I'm planning to move Rick's old dresser to the back of the closet and store out of season clothes there (maybe I could put the comforters on top of it!).  Rick has never liked his dresser.  It is a big hulking thing, bigger than he is (he's short!) and the top drawer broke a few years ago which annoyed him greatly but we never got it fixed.  So I got him a new dresser for Christmas (he asked for this!).  I don't really care if we ever get around to putting a door on the closet, it opens into a little dressing area anyway, not onto the main bedroom but I'd like the closet to look nicer and be more practical in in storage capacity.

I do wish my linen closet was bigger.  I don't know why they put such a tiny linen closet in this house.  My older, smaller house had a good sized linen closet.

6)  A Room of One's Own:

Well, I alluded to this earlier.  My two spaces where I can get some privacy are at this desk in the middle of kitchen, when no one's here, LOL, which is right now because everyone's gone down to the basement to probably play video games.  My other space is my bedroom. I love my bed.  It is so comfy.  I try to lie for at least 20 minutes every afternoon and I love, love, love getting into bed at night.  I read and play scrabble on my ipad (that's a recent thing) and sometimes listen to classical music on the radio.  That is the time I really relax.  My bed isn't all that private, my husband is there, but he's an extension of myself so he never bothers me.  And sometimes my youngest still sleeps in our room, though she sleeps on the floor at the foot of the bed, but I don't mind that either.  The other place I get privacy is the shower!  Lovely, that!

8)  Beware of Too Many Masterpieces:

Guilty!  On my mantle right now:  an old, old painting of the Virgin Mary on wood that hung on the living room wall in the house I grew up in, an old kerosene lamp that parents used when the lights went out, a candle my sister in law gave me, two little vases of flowers which are little bouquets Becky made left over from our Thanksgiving centerpiece, a crucifix made of air dried clay and a statue of Mary also made of the same clay.  These were created by Becky a few weeks ago, an old cross made of clay and then glazed that reads on it:  Do small things with great love.  That was Christmas present from Hannah many years ago.  An old Victorian mantle clock.  Then there's also car keys, a little wooden camel from the Holy Land (Granddad brought it back from his trip) and various other little sundry items.  Behind all this is an old picture of a very contented baby sitting in an old fashioned high chair.  It's a kind of famous painting from Williamsburg, VA.

Anyway, the point being is that I have way too many masterpieces but they all mean so much to me.  I am actually quite sentimental about things because they all carry memories for me.  Be warned!  If you give me something I will keep it forever.

I do feel overwhelmed by things and I am constantly either thinking about decluttering or actually decluttering.  For instance I just went through and got rid of a lot of plastic kitchen stuff that I didn't care for anymore.  I've turned against plastic!  I've got it all in a box in the garage waiting for me to take it somewhere.  I also went through all the closets the day after Thanksgiving and gave away a lot of clothing.  Bags and bags.  Yet it was just a surface sweep and I probably need to do it again about 3 times before I'm really where I should be.  One of my main housekeeping deficiencies is my lack of putting things in their right place.  I feel I've advanced in that I actually put bowls back in the same place.  When I first started housekeeping for myself, I'd put them any old place!  So I've progressed!

9)  Cleanliness and Godliness:

My kitchen sink is seldom clean.  It has perpetually got something soaking in sudsy water, or just dirty dishes piled up (as it does now!  It is calling to me!).  The only time it is really clean is when the cleaners who come every two weeks clean it.  So there!  I like things to be clean, I really do, but I don't notice messy stuff in my own house.  I'll notice it elsewhere, but in my home it just doesn't register at all to me, unless it becomes problematic.  Like I need to start cooking dinner but I can't because the sink is full of dirty dishes!  This sneaks up on me every day!  I'm not even kidding!  Or someone is coming over and I suddenly realize that the house looks absolutely trashed again!  Or I can't find library books because they've been shoved under someone's bed (along with old socks, wadded up tissues and dust bunnies).  I just don't notice things like that.  I'm better than I used to be.  But I'm still pretty bad compared to a lot of other folks.

10)  The Value of Space:

I guess I've addressed this already too.  I need to do several deep sweeps of decluttering.  My basement is such a mess right now, just filled with STUFF.  Old curriculum, sewing things, old arts and crafts, books, old toys that no one plays with anymore.  It really bothers me when I go down.  I have been avoiding it for two years now.  It got even messier when my aunt moved in.  Rick took a lot of stuff that was in the old study and just plopped it down in the basement.  And then he cleaned out the storage room and the stuff he didn't want there, well it's stacked in corners of the basement!

Okay, I've lost my train thought and I've been typing for too long and this post is way too long.  I actually need to go load the dishwasher right now!