Backstory that will temporarily feel irrelevant but later I will tie it in: When we moved into this house, three years ago now, Edward’s hoodie (the one he wore daily as a light jacket) disappeared—which shouldn’t have been THAT big of a deal, but I was already finding the entire move so emotional and overwhelming, and I HAAAAAATE the feeling of not being able to find something, and also WHERE COULD IT BE. I opened nearly every box, even ones that made no sense (maybe I’d lost my mind and used the hoodie as PADDING or something??), and finally gave up, thinking of it as just one more thing the new house had swallowed: money, joy, memories, coping skills, mental stability—and now Edward’s hoodie.
Finally someone thought to mention the issue within earshot of Paul, who, as it turned out, had inexplicably taken two large plastic bins and shoved into them: snowpants; several random pairs of our winter boots; some extra coats; AND EDWARD’S HOODIE—and put them in an awkward, unheated, difficult-to-access rakes/shovels/equipment-type closet in the barn where no one would ever go to put on snowpants, boots, an extra coat, or a hoodie. He had ONE SMALL SURGE of unpacking, and he somehow made A DELIBERATE CHOICE to put those things INTO BINS and then into an HIDDEN/BAFFLING PLACE; and it was even MORE unfindable because WHO WOULD EXPECT HIM TO PUT ANYTHING AWAY; and it caused me to waste SO MUCH TIME AND EFFORT for NO REASON. I found this so discouraging, so disheartening, so metaphorical, and so symbolic, I couldn’t face dealing with it; and so I took out the hoodie, and left the rest of it there (TO ROT IN HELL WHERE PAUL COULD TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR CASTING IT).
I may have mentioned before that I have an Alcohol Policy. My Alcohol Policy is this: if I have alcohol on a night I was intending NOT to have alcohol, I (with qualified exceptions) MUST do chores with that alcohol. I wish the dieting comparison didn’t spring to mind, but sadly we are part of this society whether we like it or not, so what it reminds me of is when someone on a diet might decide that they ought not to have the extra cookie—but if they DO have the extra cookie, they need to do exercise to burn it off. Though—it seems like in the case of the cookie/exercise, that’s generally considered a punishment/penance; whereas with me, and alcohol, it’s more of a feeling of let’s not WASTE the extra cheery motivation. It would be like reframing the diet thing so that you were saying let’s not WASTE the food energy of the cookie, and instead let’s use it to build strength and stamina, which is something we want to do but sometimes have trouble finding the energy for. Like that.
Tonight I had alcohol when I had planned not to have alcohol, and so I asked myself what chore I was going to do, and I decided to do the one I most dreaded, which was working on putting away Christmas. I HATE putting away Christmas. It’s a big chore, and also it’s so sad: the worst chore combination, and the perfect chore for being under the influence. Christmas dishes, Christmas mugs, assorted Christmas decor, the Melissa & Doug advent calendar—boxed up and brought to the barn. Wrapping paper and gift tags and ribbons and one stray box of Christmas cards—boxed up and brought to the barn. Empty ornament storage box brought down from the barn and put invitingly NEAR the tree at least.
Then I reached an impasse: I was not done, but the rest of the Christmas dishes/mugs were in the dishwasher. And I was not quite ready to de-ornament the tree. But I still had cheery alcohol motivation remaining.
While walking back and forth to the barn with boxes of Christmas stuff, I had noticed The Closet From the First Paragraph. I hadn’t thought of it or noticed it in literally years—but the other day Elizabeth wanted to go sledding, and was looking for snowpants, and she asked if we had any, and I Thought Of It. I sent her to go look, and she reported that the bins had not been latched closed (FOR SOME REASON) (WHYYYYY) (NO BUT WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY), and so had been infiltrated by dust and spiderwebs (JUST WEBS, I AM SURE JUST WEBS AND NOT WEB-MAKERS), so she had to borrow snowpants from her friend. I decided that alcohol and I would finally tackle this project that had been hanging over my head for three years.
And so now the snowpants and coats are in the washing machine. Items that are too small for anyone in the house AND non-spiderwebby are in the Goodwill bag, waiting to be joined by the items that are too small for anyone in the house but were spider-webby so are in the washing machine. My forgotten hot-pink polka-dotted rainboots are back in my life, though I don’t know how I can ascertain if there is anything spider-webby IN them, without putting my HAND or FOOT in there with, maybe, spiders. Elizabeth’s long-lost winter scarf is on the hook with her backpack. Several new items purchased to donate to a charity drive (where did Paul even FIND them?) are back in the donation pile. Two giant empty bins are newly available for storage, this time in a place that makes sense.
Well Paul needs to be putting his hand into your boots, not you. And I once had a beetle in my wellies (I lived in England at the time where they were wellies) and how dare that beetle.
Vacuum hose down the boots is the only way.
Also my suggestion. Maybe tip them out, out of doors, in case something that should not be vacuumed (idk earrings? All the other inexplicable stuff is in there) is in hiding. Then vacuum.
Second that
Came here to say this. Vacuum hose or powerful canned air (but vacuum is better, then you aren’t dealing with blasted/propelled webmakers).
Or, might I suggest, PAUL’S HAND.
Stick the vacuum nozzle with the long end attached into the boots! And you will not even need to know if there were or were not web-makers in there previously :)
This reminds me of when I discovered after AN ENTIRE YEAR that my husband had put a car seat that we use for air travel “away” IN THE (detached, unheated, un-anythinged, really just a glorified storage shed in the very very moist PNW) GARAGE instead of the attic after a trip, and it was covered in mold and could not be salvaged. Well, I could have ordered all-new soft parts for it, for the same cost as a new car seat. And car seats are SO ANNOYING to recycle. I still haven’t completed that task. The fabricless frame just sits near the back door, mocking me. Sigh.
I’m very proud of and inspired by you for conquering your distasteful task.
Target has an annual trade-in event for expired car seats… maybe they would take it off your hands??
I like your alcohol strategy! I do not usually drink a huge amount, maybe two glasses of wine a week? Which is mainly because I have a toddler who does not sleep so my hangover threshold/exhausted to the point I cannot function threshold is painfully low. But over Christmas we were at my parents’ house and apparently when you’re a retired baby boomer daily drinking is totally acceptable/normal? And I got into a very nice but not super practical habit of having a glass of wine every day. And now January is bleak and depressing and while I genuinely think Dry January is a CRUEL concept, it was definitely time to go back to my usual routine. Buuut I think I’m going to make my occasional drinks more special… and make my husband get the cocktail shaker out.
Also, my husband would never fill a random box and put it in a random place because he WILL NEVER PUT AWAY ANYTHING AND IS IMPERVIOUS TO CLUTTER. Not sure which is worse tbh?
Vacuum the boots! Don’t put your hand in! Or make Paul put his hand in!
Okay, this: “thinking of it as just one more thing the new house had swallowed: money, joy, memories, coping skills, mental stability—and now Edward’s hoodie.” Oh, Swistle, you are a joy in my life.
I find completing those kinds of tasks SO SATISFYING but yet, so hard to start. Once I start, I’m off to the races, but it takes me forever to get going.
I love that everyone is suggesting vacuum hose and Paul as the solution to your problem.
IT’S UNANIMOUS, PAUL
Oh, Paul. PAUL. WHY, Paul? He makes my head hurt.
He should definitely be the one to clean out your boots. Though I suppose you would have to supervise, from a distance, to make sure he actually sticks his hand all the way in, and doesn’t just vaguely shake it and say he’s sure it’s fine.
Oh, PAUL.
My husband tends to put things OUT OF SIGHT rather than ACTUALLY AWAY. It drives me absolutely insane. He dislikes clutter as much as I do, but he will just…take things and shove them into closets, onto shelves, under beds?? SIR WE ARE NOT TEENAGERS.
Related: any clothing on the ground immediately goes into the hamper. Tried on once and then tossed aside? Hamper. Clean, folded, just not put away yet? HAMPER. Any towel that has been used a single time but he does not want to hang up, HAMPER. CLEAN CLOTHES IN PILES ON THE GROUND THAT I HAVE NOT HAD THE CHANCE TO PUT AWAY – HAMPERRRRR. I do so goddamn much unnecessary laundry some weeks.
This is exactly how my two teenagers “clean” their rooms and NOTHING I say. nor my good example, can sway them. So frustrating. Their future partners are going to have Disparaging Thoughts about their upbringing but I am trying so hard to no avail. One of them does her own laundry now and STILL just throws everything in the hamper.
My husband does this…and then forgets all about it. Drives me BONKERS!
they’re fully rubber boots, no leather or cloth? Throw them in the tub and rinse!
I really love this idea of alcohol-fueled productivity. I’ve been trying to readjust my reasons for alcohol consumption and therefore the consumption itself. And this concept fits very very nicely into that whole reframing. Thanks, Swistle! The world is a better place with you in it!
You make me laugh! Thank you!
Another vote for Paul’s hand in the boot.
I have a daunting task ahead of me, but it is Culling Three Boxes of Precious Baby Things Down to One, so I think alcohol would make me more maudlin than productive.
This reminds me that I am always curious about your barn when you mention it. Is it near the house, or are you trekking a long ways each time you replace a bin? (The barn of my childhood was probably a five-minute walk from the house. Not bad, but distinctly undesirable in winter.) Were there any fun items left in the barn by previous owners? Are there any uses/plans for it besides storage?
The barn is attached to the house, but involves a bit of a trek: out the laundry room into the mudroom, up a flight of stairs, through a door, up a couple of stairs, through another door—and then across the barn and through another door and up a flight of stairs to get to the loft area, which is where we store things. I think I would have LOVED this meandering path as a child, and still love it now to some extent—but on the other hand, it makes storage a vigorous and not untreacherous task (the stairs are the steep/narrow kind typical of old houses).
Let’s see if I can remember the things left behind. I’d been hoping for old trunks and furniture, but it was well cleared-out. There was an American flag. An old set of metal house numbers. A wooden sign with the previous owners’ surname on it. A “protected by home security” sign. Partial boxes of things from remodels: floor tiles, decorated wall tiles, that sort of thing. A box of old little metal things, I forget what they were but nothing interesting or it would have stuck in my mind. A kitchen cabinet that matches the current kitchen cabinets and looks used but we can’t IMAGINE where it ever would have fit. The best thing was a box of old keys, many of which go to parts of the house that no longer exist, and/or have mystifying tags on them: “boathouse,” for example, when there is no boathouse and we are nowhere near anywhere that would have a boathouse; and “East Parlor.”
One of my friends mentioned that in her youth, she used to attend parties held in a similar barn. It would have been a FABULOUS rainy-day play area (perfect for riding toys!) when the kids were little, but they’re too old. I think it would be pretty interesting to see if it could be in any way…finished? Like, insulated and turned into More House? But I doubt we will ever do that, especially since it is separated from the main house by a room of unheated space on each floor (a mudroom and an…upper mudroom, which is just sort of a space to walk through on one’s way to the barn), so THAT would probably have to be turned into More House as well.
Boathouse! East Parlor! Those keys sound amazing and I can imagine being a child and being OBSESSED with figuring out what they went to!
I want to ask you a bunch more questions but I will refrain. I will say that if you ever did a Barn Tour post, I would be delighted.
Me too!
Me three! I’m amazed and filled with wonder and can’t wrap my mind around going up a flight of stairs to enter the barn! Your house sounds so intriguing, it would be a super cool tour! Omg or a video?!
It’s a very odd set-up! It was built into the land, which is hilly, so the FIRST floor of the barn is flush with the SECOND floor of the house!
If you haven’t watched Locke and Key on netflix, you should because it is fun and this comment reminded me of it!
I’m up for the Barn Tour too! If not a barn tour, maybe one day you could tell us how old your house is, whether it’s on much land, and your current feeling about living there? So nosy over here!
Ha, okay! The house is 200 years old, although we don’t know much about the remodel history, so for example it’s hard to know which walls are horsehair plaster and which are drywall, which rooms are As They Were and which are unrecognizably renovated/changed/added. The kitchen is modern but very weird, so we think it was patched together from a couple of non-kitchen rooms (the original kitchen is now the laundry room). We know that at one point TWELVE rooms (!!!) were taken off because they were too decrepit/unsalvagable. It is on a little over an acre of land. The barn is smallish, so I don’t know what it was used for; it doesn’t look big enough for, like, livestock, so I wonder if it was decorative/storage from the very start?
My current feeling is that I am fully adjusted to living here, and can even feel very FOND of this house and comfy in it, while still feeling painful/sad/nostalgic/regretful feelings about the old house. I feel like the old house was MINE, whereas I just TEMPORARILY LIVE IN this house.
(I should say: it’s hard for US to know about the walls. I’m sure anyone with the smallest amount of experience/knowledge could look at each wall and immediately tell the difference. But we are a bit Dum about such things, and so we don’t know it’s horsehair plaster until we lightly bonk into it and leave a huge crater.)
Maybe a coach house? The actual horses to pull the carriages/wagons would have had a barn farther away for all the reasons one would want the horse house to be farther away.
Not necessarily: connected farms where the animal barn was attached directly to the house were quite common a couple of hundred years ago, particularly in New England (though of course I don’t know where Swistle lives). The Mennonites in Manitoba, Canada also used to build house/barn units.
Maybe similar to the way that some dwellings used to be built in a lot of countries – the livestock downstairs and human accommodation above them both for proximity purposes and for utilising the rising heat given off?
I lived in New Orleans for years. Years. With its quaint interior courtyards that even tours were like “to keep out the noise of the rowdy streets of New Orleans”
And then, very recently, and maybe at the children’s museum in NOLA, but maybe not, IT WAS TO CORRAL THE LIVESTOCK that lived on the ground floor.
Mind. Blown.
This is why we can never move. Anything that I personally didn’t pack would never be found again. Never. I wouldn’t necessarily mind this except that it would drive me insane and I would be resentful and we’re just going to live in this house that isn’t big enough until we die.
SAME! and packing sucks regardless. And house prices are STUPID.
All of my Christmas decor is still up. I guess I have not had enough alcohol.
Now I’m wondering how much alcohol would help me with a call to the utility company…
Ugh, that does warrant some self-medication.
I have had a long week of being on hold and talking to customer service/support with at least four, maybe five companies and I’ve hardly hated being an adult more. To confirm my sense that one company was particularly incompetent/unhelpful/abusive, I actually added up the minutes for my multiple calls to them. Turns out I was “accidentally” disconnected between 26 and 27 minutes on three of the 8-10 calls. Like, I understand you have metrics but DO NOT HANG UP ON ME just as we were about to figure it out.
Anyway, shout out to Costco whose rep seemed a little stressed and inexperienced and not really knowing the ins and outs of everything but who also seemed genuinely motivated to fix the thing for me and was sincerely apologetic about how long it was taking and who called me back when she really did hang up on me accidentally. It was the last of the PITA calls for the week (no, ugh, one more tomorrow) and all the others made her look so good in comparison.
Aside, my cousin has long worked for Costco and reports that they treat their employees well. Sample size of one, but if he’s right, then that pays off with employees who are eager to do a good job and treat the (polite) customers well.
We are in the process of moving to a house (our first house!) and it has greatly highlighted the vast differences in packing styles between my fiance and I. He is of the ‘Just put it in a box! Which box? Doesn’t matter, all boxes are going to the house anyway so it will be fine. If there is a space, fill it with whatever appropriately sized item you can find, regardless of correlation to the contents of the box’ and I’m…not. He put our spatulas in with the video games! Our laundry detergent is in a box with our summer/lightweight coats! It is making me insane and yet we are moving in a week and just need to get it done, so I am biting my tongue and already resigning myself to the fact that a slightly tipsy Future Me will need to unpack alllllll the boxes at the new place, instead of just unpacking a little at a time.
Back in the day, when I had to do a clean I was avoiding, I would buy a bottle of champagne, drink a glass and get to work. I kept my glass filled as the project went on, I’d put on some music and it would be enjoyable. 30 some years later, that trick doesn’t work, but it did for quite a long time. Champagne feels celebratory to me, so it made an unpleasant task a bit more fun.
I…. Paul… *inarticulate rage noises*. Is divorce or murder really truly out of the question? Okay then, moving on. It takes me forever to de-Christmas. I am NOT a ‘jump into the new year being all productive and shit’ kind of person. My mood bottoms out in January and I don’t do a lot or do anything quickly. The nice thing this year is I did a bunch of cleaning and decluttering just before decorating for Christmas, so as I move the Christmas decorations out it becomes apparent that it will be nice and clean when I’m done. I never drink alcohol by myself, it just doesn’t occur to me, but I rather like your routine.