I’m sure you figured by my absence that I did go back and work. I actually managed a part time schedule – and that advice was just what I needed. I worked a couple days a week and worked in the house the other days. It allowed me to feel like I actually was being responsible and not being ungrateful that I have a decent job, while still being able to start shoveling my way out of the mire of home improvement projects. So thanks a million Snoskrad. I was really at a loss there for awhile. We now have one room in the house that is done enough to actually live in. I still have to paint the woodwork, but we were at least able to pull the paper off the floor and remove the tarps from the furniture.

In our front room we have ceilings that go up to 17 ft high, and those go up stairs too short in depth to hold anything other than a stepladder, and we cannot get our hands on a stepladder tall enough. So I’ve had to swallow my pride and hire painters. Who have failed to show up the past two weeks. It’s somebody who’s doing us a favor, so we can’t really complain. A real professional painter wouldn’t want to bother with us because all we want painted is a ceiling and two walls. So us beggars can’t be choosy and we have to wait for when they can get around to us.

It is however, a major knock on my pride. What would MacGyver say to this? Little Miss “I Can Make That Friday” hiring somebody else to do her work? Gasp! For shame!

We’re kind of being held hostage by the painters. Since they’re painting the ceiling and everything high up, we can’t really paint anything else on the main floor until they’re done. We’ve primed everything and done what we can, but now we’re just waiting for someone who can squeeze us in.

In the meantime, this is how we’ve been living:

Here’s a better view of all the plaster dust and wallpaper scraps covering the floor:

I’ve actually tried both sweeping and vacuuming on top of the construction paper, and it doesn’t work. Sweeping just pushes everything under the paper, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the paper in the first place, and vacuuming just pulls the paper off the floor. Our feet are constantly coated in a layer of sand, kitty litter, plaster dust, and assorted paper remnants. I’m tempted to put a doormat at the foot of the bed.

Have you ever seen those episodes of Oprah when she has the “savers” on? They’re people who literally cannot throw away anything. I saw one lady whose garage was stuffed floor to ceiling with old newspapers and baby clothes and discarded rags, and when the professional organizer asked her to throw them away she had a nervous breakdown. It turns out that the savers have a serious mental illness which is a form of OCD. The expert psychologist was explaining if someone with OCD loses control of their environment, then they will become paralyzed and the pendulum of their psychosis will swing the other way.

That’s how I feel right now. The chaos in my house has been so bad for so long, that I can’t seem to get the energy up to change it. I broke myself with my own mess.

Crap.

Crap crap.

I only have 12 days left here, and they just asked me to stay three more weeks. The lady whose maternity leave I’m covering has decided to take her vacation days to stay home longer. Not that I blame her a bit, I certainly wouldn’t want to come back to a crappy cubicle job when there is a baby at home, but now I have to decide whether I should be responsible and work the extra three weeks, or just get out of here as soon as possible.

When I started working here, I remember thinking, “I will never discount my work in the home again.” I’ve felt guilty for staying home ever since I got healthy, feeling that I was being a kept woman and that I was contributing nothing to the world. I felt that staying home when we didn’t have kids was a ridiculous waste. Then I started working full time and watched our lives fall down around us.

I recognize that most people work. Most people find a balance. I do not appear to be capable of this. Consider it another symptom of my poor health, or one of my many failings in general, but when I work all day, I cannot do anything else. I come home at six and I crash. Our house is disgusting, what little food is left in the fridge needed to be thrown out weeks ago, I haven’t cooked anything in months and the garbage from fast food is mounding like Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout won’t take it out. I can occasionally manage to wash the clothes but then forget to dry them, or if I’m really on the ball I’ll dry them but never ever fold them so that all of our clothes are in huge snow drifts about the house until one of the cats pees on them and I have to start all over.

Bear’s job has been a nightmare. I wish I could talk about it because HOLY CRAP has it been nuts, but we all know the first rule of blogging is don’t talk about your job. If I get fired from mine it would totally simplify things, but we’d actually like him to keep his. My point is, when he finally gets home at seven, he has nothing left to tend to what I have nothing left to tend to. We are a wreck.

I have friends that I have not spoken to in months. (Bless your heart, shutterbug. Hold on, I’m coming.) (Good Twin, Are you still out there?)

Then we have this big beautiful house that needs a ridiculous amount of work. We’re moving in tomorrow because I just can’t stand this chaos anymore. At this point we have every weekend for the next three years scheduled out with home improvement projects. I wish I was joking. If I told you how many weeping breakdowns I have had over the past month you would think so very much less of me. I just do not have it in me to live this way. I crave order so profoundly that more than a few (cough*dozen*cough) people have called me Monk. I joke about being OCD, but I truly am. And most days I consider it a blessing because I am clean and orderly and efficient. This is the first time in my life where it has actually brought me to my knees.

On the other hand, we have this big beautiful house that needs a ridiculous amount of work. And that takes a whole lot of money. Money that could be provided by three more weeks of work. On the other, other hand, all the money I’ve made so far that I earmarked for furniture has already been spent on stuff we couldn’t budget for: higher than anticipated closing costs, escrow fees, home inspection charges, an entire years worth of homeowners insurance upfront, etc. I have no guarantee that three more weeks of work will actually get me the dining room table I’m pining over and not go to taxes or whatever other miscellaneous charges come up. I may be able to bring myself to work for a dining room table, but paying off taxes is not going to get me out of bed in the morning. I’d rather do without.

And yet even with all this to support me leaving, I’m feeling guilty. Shouldn’t I be productive? Shouldn’t I do something with my life? Does sitting in a cubicle count as something? Should I keep a crappy job just to have a job? Does that make me more worthwhile?

The question in all this pretty much boils down to: Order, or Money? With a sub question of Am I being irresponsible? Cold hard cash is great, but at this particular moment, I don’t know that it’s worth it. This has turned out to be such a beyond crappy year, I think my sanity might just be worth more than a dining room table.

Whoever invented wallpaper deserves a slow painful death.

I intended to have all the wallpaper down, the whole downstairs painted, my studio painted, and the master painted before we moved into the house at the end of the month.

The problems with these goals are many:

1. I’m still working full-time at the stupid stupid temp job and don’t even get home until nearly 6. By the time I put on work clothes, eat something quick, and make it over to the house, I get about an hour before it’s time to come back to the apartment for a shower and bed.

2. It is driving me absolutely insane to not be in the house. I cannot live like this for one second more. It’s like asking a kid to just sit in the same room as the Christmas presents.

3. This house has so many wonky home improvement projects for us to fix that it’s going to take us months. Up the stairs there is painted over wallpaper we’re going to have to dig out shred by shred. The master bedroom needs to be sanded down completely because some previous owner crackle painted the walls and it’s still visible under at least three layers of paint. We’re finding the craziest colors layer after layer. The kitchen alone has been bright yellow, bright orange, and wallpapered in just the past six years. And every improvement was done half-assed. The switchplates were painted to the wall, windows were painted shut, bathroom tile was painted over, mold had gotten between the wall and the wallpaper. The walls are in bad bad condition.

4. My studio has been packed for nearly six months and I’m starting to twitch. While my stupid stupid temp job is really not that awful, I can’t stand it because I do absolutely nothing purposeful and nothing creative. It’s amazing what a toll that is taking on me. I walked into JoAnn’s the other day to get a peacock feather (I’m channeling inspiration for paint colors) and I nearly cried as I left because I missed being creative so very much. If I felt like my work accomplished anything, I could at least take solace in that, but I’m getting paid to sit at a desk and look busy when I could be making my dream home. It’s just torture for me. While we’ve lived here I have been making a few things here and there to try to satisfy the urge, but it doesn’t work. And now I get home at night and have the time to do a couple of rows of knitting before passing out.

So we’re just going to move in. With paper down all over the floor and wallpaper all over the place and not a stitch of painting done. With crazy mirrors still up in the studio. We’ll be moving our bedroom into one of the spares and everything else into the garage. And it will probably stay that way until I leave my job at the end of the month, but at least we’ll be closer to living like normal people.

There are about a million and one antique slash vintage slash thrift slash consignment stores around here. One of the many bounties of living in a resort town.

Over lunch I zipped over to Pacific Coast Highway so I could check out about four in about 15 minutes. Most of the stores were predictably shabby chic/ country kitchen, which is totally not my style. I don’t really know what you’d call my style…maybe Elegant Juxtaposition. I love antiques and unique finds, but I don’t want my house to look like a vintage store. I also don’t want it to look like a furniture showroom. I want a mixture of great pieces done in a really modern glam way.

I hit the jackpot at one of the stores. I found a knockoff tulip chair and a gorgeous teak desk to put in the former breakfast, current office nook. Tons of mid-century modern stuff. I’ll have to go back this weekend and see what I can take home with me.

Next door was a ratty old consignment shop. But since this is not my first time at the dance, I am unafraid of a dingy store because I know that there could still be treasures inside. I wander around for awhile and end up in a back corner when the owner comes back to help me. He was shorter than me, probably 65, and dressed like he just took home whatever clothes were too beaten up to sell in the store.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“Hmm…nope. I guess I’m just looking for something great to jump out at me.”

I wander out of that corner and have to pass by him in the tiny aisles created by looming armoires and discarded entertainment centers. As I pass he steps in to me and leers as he says, “Well get back in that corner and it might be me.”

I just kind of awkwardly laughed and said, “Oh Dear.” And then got myself out of there as soon as I could. I still have the shudders. Ew.