The Death Trap

A stack of books.

A pile of clothes.

Your 2ed grader's art project.

Wooden scraps from a dinosaur puzzle/model.

A box of small toys.

A lap desk.

A box of crayons.

A table cloth.

A stacking paper/folder organizer.

An empty plastic bag.

These are all things normal people do not leave piled up on their living room couch. These are also all things that I have just noted to be on my family's living room couch. I would fix this problem in a heartbeat. The hard part is: this stuff doesn't belong to me. I'll totally toss the wooden scraps the next time I head to the kitchen. But the rest of it... Tell me what I could do with it. It's not mine to get rid of. And quite literally there is no place for me to move it to. I've don't what I could with my own stuff, and I have a few more things to go through, but when I'm done with my stuff... will I really be able to do anything about the rest of the house? My big goal this summer is to try. So far I haven't done much. Can ya blame me? It's depressing just being in this house, so it's that much easier to ignore it and spend time on the Internet, blogging, socializing, and making planes to get out of the house with my friends. But I wonder how this house got so bad in the first place? It's always ALWAYS been cluttered. But we used to be able to spread out on the living room floor and play with toys.

All the room we have in the living room now is two chairs and... Nope that's it. You can watch TV, or play the Gamecube. If you want to stretch out and relax, go find a bed... it's not that easy to find one under all the clutter. OK, so not finding a bed may be a tiny bit of an exaggeration... maybe.

What kills me more then the mess is the fact that I just can't enjoy my house. As you can see in my photograph there is but a little path leading from one room to the next. This photo was actually taken about a year ago when my roommate was up for a week long visit. This was just a day when we didn't have much to do, and obsessed over the house for entertainment. Entertainment has never been more depressing. The mess is not limited to the living room. The clutter has spread like a disease to the rest of the house. The bathroom is probably the safest place at this point. But what really makes me go mad is the way the kitchen is so... look for yourself. No one has eaten at that table in years. And the refrigerator really shouldn't be in that corner. We got a new fridge when we got sick of the antique one. The old one had been under the cupboards, (I'll show you a photo of those cupboards later) but the new fridge was too tall. We had planes to butcher the cupboard to make the fridge fit... it would be OK, the top of the fridge would be a stand-in for the lost shelf space. Turns out they've settled for leaving the fridge in the breakfast-nook, shoved the table into the corner and ... let it clutter. Are you depressed yet? Well we have a place to store the ice cream and the left-overs. But where to we heat up our food? You probably can't see the microwave in the photograph... it's hidden under a lot of paper and crap, so there really is no way to get to it... and even if you moved all that junk you still wouldn't be able to plug the darn thing in. So what about the stove. Well I should really take a new photo of the stove, because the one I have here looks way better the what's in the kitchen now. The great thing about this photograph is that you can actually tell that it is a stove. Now... Well you can't anymore. And as you can see, no body's getting into those bottom drawers any time soon. You know, it really sucks not being able to cook anything. That stove was going to be my baby. I was going to learn to cook. I was the one who picked out the stove and convinced my mother it would be an easy one to clean. BACH! Like anyone in this house cares if it's clean. Nobody even bothers to put their crap away anymore! Like I said before, none of this stuff is mine. Oh, except for the stove! But I'm trying to build up the mental capacity to just start cleaning. I need to not care if my mother gets mad at me for tossing what normal people call trash. Like those cardboard cup holders you get at fast food joints. Yeah, she would use them to organize those little salt and pepper packets that also came from the fast food joints. I know she owns shakers, I've seen them, they are cute little chefs. Does she use those? No! Now here's the photograph of the cupboards the old refrigerator was located under. I know you've just been biting your nails in anticipation for this. Now this photo only shows the two cupboards that the doors got taken off of, there are about three more to the right, all of them just as packed as these two. Now we only have half that amount of cereal bowls, but there still isn't room to wash AND put away the rest of the dirty dishes, so those usually just sit in the sink. And those boxes of cookies and crackers and such... I know it would be really scary if I told you they were still there. Luckily they are gone. In their place... nothing eatable. Oh well. There is a sort of cart thing filled with snacks... it's in the kitchen, in front of the basement door. Sound so incredibly safe, right? I know, I worry about that too. But at least I can enjoy a lovely view of... stuff in front of the window. *sigh* Well... at least I can let my friends in through the front door right? OK, never mind. You can't even tell there IS a front door in this picture... and even if those curtains weren't there, there would be a pile off stuff hiding the door anyway.

Well, I'm sure you can see the size of the job that is cleaning my house. And you haven't even seen the scary photographs!