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Posts Tagged ‘Small House’

  1. I Feel a Little Like Chris Farley

    March 11, 2014 by admin

    Right now I am sitting at my desk, which is located in my dining room. The desk is stuffed in the corner of the room, about an arm’s length away from the dining table, which is covered in papers, school projects, magazines, miscellaneous craft items, wet wipes, matchbox cars and God only knows what else. I can’t move my desk chair without bumping into something: grocery bags, bins of more miscellaneous items and boxes of papers for one of my part-time gigs that I have no where else to put.

    This one room is a small microcosm of the rest of my world. Most of the other rooms in my house are, unfortunately, in much the same state. We are 5 (soon-to-be 6) people stuffed into a 1,134 square-foot, single-level (SINGLE LEVEL!) house. And I am about to go insane. Um. Correction. I am already there.

    Remember that old Chris Farley bit, Fat Guy in a Little Coat? That’s exactly how I feel. Like we’re always on the verge of bursting at the seams.

    Just when I think things are kind of, sort of in order, life happens and everything goes to shit. Crap everywhere and no one can get away from anyone else. I literally feel like the old woman who lived in a shoe. I hesitate to have friends over because most of the time that means piling up a bunch of stuff on my bed and closing the door so the rest of the house looks clean. Then, after the visit, it stays that way the rest of the day and I revel in my new, tidy living space. Until it’s time to go to sleep.  Then all the crap just goes back to its place in our disorganized universe.

    People with bigger homes – and most all of our friends have bigger homes (a whole other issue) – say that life in a house with more space is no different. There is just more crap to contend with. I don’t know if I agree. And I definitely won’t let that sway me from moving into a more spacious home someday, hopefully soon. Like ASAP. Yesterday.

    Because in our house, not only do we not have enough places to put things, but a lack of space just makes all the other little annoyances of life 10 times as worse.

    As I’m writing, my kids are pushing toy shopping carts around and around the dining room table and it sounds like a jack-hammer in the middle of NYC. They are dodging all the crap that’s piled everywhere and bumping into me and knocking things over and I want to stand up and scream my head off but I can’t because they are only children doing what they do. So I record this video, and surprisingly, it makes me laugh.

    OurCrazy  (To get the full effect, turn up your volume. All. The. Way.)

    Not to mention that a little while ago, I nearly lost my shit over a glass of spilled milk because, before I could get to the paper towels, it spread to all of those papers, projects and magazines on the dining room table, soaking them in a sticky, stinky mess.

    Family life in a small house means that every weekend, I am stomping around looking for places to put things and making Target runs to buy plastic bins. I yell to no one in particular (because really no one really wants to hear it anymore), “I’m getting organized!”

    It sort of looks like this:

    543939_10151967754250682_567007707_n

    I can spare you the rest of the gory details of our space-challenged domestic existence, but honestly, I don’t know what we’ll do between June 2014, when our 4th child will be born, and Spring 2015, when we will hopefully (because if we don’t, I may just need to throw all our personal possessions away) sell our house, which contains a lot of good memories, but just can’t harness all of our awesomeness. Yes. That is what I’ll call it. Awesomeness.

    Oh, BTW, did I also mention we have only one bathroom?