Cleanliness is next to what?

We got home from vacation last Thursday and I am ashamed to admit that both of our suitcases are sitting on the bed in the spare bedroom open with clothes half unpacked and strewn about the room. I find that the spare bed has become more of another place for me to stash overflow clothes rather than a place for guests to sleep and in fact, the only time the bed gets cleared off is approximately one hour before we have a guest over.

I have a. lot. of. clothes. It is ridiculous. Plus it is that time of year when I need to put the winter clothes away and get the rest of the summer stuff out. If I try to keep everything out all year, there isn’t enough room in my closet and bedroom furniture for everything. There is also an enormous amount of clutter in my nightstand drawers (books I read over a year ago, pictures, magazines, etc….), which if cleared, could provide an extra amount of space. But do you think I have jumped on that bandwagon yet? No, of course not. Because every night when I drag my sorry self home from this shit hole I call an office, the last thing I want to do is start organizing and trying to make the decision as to what I should get rid of. Maybe I need to watch an episode of Hoarders to inspire me.

The other problem (I am full of excuses) is that I made a very very poor purchase of bedroom furniture when I was about 22. After I got out of college and moved back home to my parents house (not the best decision I ever made) I found myself unable to tolerate my childhood bedroom set which happened to be off-white with shiny brass trim that I once found beautiful and irresistible. So I got the bright idea that I would purchase a nice new bedroom set which I purchased interest free from a local furniture store and also happened to be solid oak and to call it huge would be an understatement. It was the floor model set so I got a really good deal and it included a headboard, footboard, dresser with tri-fold mirror, a nightstand and the biggest chest of drawers you have ever seen. It is three drawers across and about 7 or 8 rows high and it holds a lot of shit.

The problem is that, with the exception of the bedroom at my parents house, I have never been able to fit the damn thing in any bedroom. It wouldn’t fit at my condo and when we bought our house, it sure wouldn’t fit in our bedroom. I hate it and I want to take a chainsaw and hack it up into little pieces and burn them one by one. It sat in my parent’s garage for years until, when we were moving into our current house, my dad seized the opportunity to force me to take delivery of it. Did I mention that it does fit in Sam’s room? Since he has no real bedroom set and only a twin bed, we were able to wedge it in there and now he has lots of space to store all his clothes and other little odds and ends. Did I mention the thing is solid oak and weighs about 700 lbs (that might be a slight exaggeration, but it is f'ing heavy!) even with the drawers all pulled out of it?

I tried to sell the whole set a few years ago and Sam had a fit. Apparently he has bonded with the damn thing and now he refuses to part with it. So that leaves me a piece short in my bedroom and since I have to split the drawers in the dresser with Dave, I have a lot of overflow when it comes to clothes storage. Since I am avoidant when it comes to difficult decisions (like getting rid of clothes), I tend to just pile things up in the spare bedroom and shut the door.

Okay, I’m getting depressed typing this. I had repressed the trauma of the giant dresser and actually was not thinking of it when I started this post. I thought I had made peace with the situation, but it turns out I haven’t. It’s a catch-22. If I don’t sell the existing set, I can’t afford to buy a new set. My husband doesn’t care if our room is an unfinished hodge podge and every time I bring up buying a new set, he poo-poos it.

I wonder if he’ll will show me how to use the chainsaw this weekend……