Lately, it seems like I am spending too much time shifting stuff. I feel a little overwhelmed with stuff. We have always had too much stuff. Then, we sold the lakehouse and moved a lot more stuff here. Travis’ folks moved into a retirement community, so some of that stuff ended up here. A lot of the extra stuff remains in the garage. I haven’t even started that project yet because Travis is working on his project in the basement, so the garage is crowded with a compound miter saw, a table saw, drywall, and other project related items. It’s hard to think about organizing stuff in the garage, when so much needs to be out. So, I am avoiding that. 

The other location that collected lake stuff is Tayden’s closet. Actually, Tayden’s room doesn’t have a closet because this house is so weird. It was changed from its original design, so Tayden’s room ended up without a closet and the upstairs hall has no lights. The saving grace is that there is a huge walk-in closet across the hall (and down a little) from Tayden’s room. Tayden uses that closet. At least, he did until I stuffed boxes from the lakehouse in there to deal with later. Then, he lived out of his clean laundry pile in the laundry room and avoided opening that closet. His closet was so bad that we couldn’t even fit everything from the lake into it, so there were some boxes in the hall (the one without lights) outside the closet door. We were starting to look like hoarders. About a month back, I decided to organize that closet and get rid of stuff so Tayden could actually use his across-the-hall closet. 

You know how some things have to get worse before they get better. This was one of those things. I thought I would be done before Thanksgiving, but I wasn’t. Travis frequently needs extra hands with his basement project and I was called away to help him over and over. Side note, full sheets of drywall are bulky and heavy and shouldn’t be moved around the outside of the house to go in the backdoor if it is windy. Back to the closet. I unloaded everything into the unlit hall to start organizing and tossing. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving comes, and the girls come home. And they bring stuff. And their bedroom door is at the end of the hall that looks like a hoarder’s delight with boxes of questionable stuff lining either side, spilling out into the middle. Somehow, they wrestle their stuff past the hall stuff to get it into their room, which also needs some organizational help because they used to each have their own rooms, but now they share. 

So, we were living with the hoarders delight, fire hazard hall, made more difficult to navigate because it isn’t lit (it definitely isn’t lit). Then Christmas decorations descend from the attic. Seriously? Oh yes! But we have only partially decorated, so we can’t put the empty boxes back because I am not done with them yet. How did it get this bad? So I call it a work in progress. I have no idea how they are navigating the gauntlet upstairs because my bedroom is mercifully on the main floor. The basement looks like a construction zone, which it is. We can tuck the tools behind the bar and under the pool table though and use the space if we need to. With six of us back home, we frequently need to. Someday, this house will be great. I just don’t have any idea when that someday is. I have slowly made progress in Tayden’s closet. Unfortunately for Tayden, it is a multi-use closet that includes linen closet stuff, games (and games and games), some of the girls’ clothes because they don’t fit in their shared closet, and other random stuff. It’s likely to get crazy again!

Have a great humpday everyone. And remember, at least you’re doing better than me.