My Hoarding Problem

If you've been reading this blog for a little while, you've learned some things about me. I have three children, a husband, and a mischievous imaginary moose. I am no good at pulling into parking spaces and I am obsessed with burlap and Nutella. Now I'm about to lay all my cards on the table: I may be addicted to buying throw pillows. Here is the sorry, sorry evidence:

That is no less than twelve throw pillows. That ginormous box that I just purchased to store all of them is woefully inadequate. I bought the box because I'm trying to make some headway in the "study." The K tactfully inquired whether there was "some way" to make the study "more functional." Of course there is, but the kind of functionality he's looking for comes at a price and can only be achieved with the talents of someone who is not me.

Part of the problem in the room is that the girls' birthdays are coming up, so I'm storing their presents in the study and somebody is getting stilts (!) from Granddad:

The study is the place where I store the things I intend to use, but just haven't gotten around to actually using. It's also the place that things go when we need to get rid of them, but haven't figured out how to dispose of them. Case in point, we have an old computer that needs to be trashed:

You can see it behind the chair and the guitar, sitting on top of the box. It's right there next to my deflating Sesame Street birthday balloons. Folks, those last two sentences should be enough evidence to send me to clutter prison for all eternity. But, here's the thing: our city has an electronics recycling day and we're waiting to recycle the computer so it doesn't end up in a landfill. Will the computer make it to the recycling day? On scale from "highly probable" to "not a chance in hell," I'd put us right in the middle, but that's a high enough probability that I have to hold onto it.

I can deal with a certain amount of clutter, especially if it's clutter in closets because then I can't see it all the time. But, even I had to draw the line at this awfulness. I also thought I might lose the Baby under an avalanche of boxes. So, after several hours and many trips to the attic with armloads of stuff, this is how we're looking now:

Better, right? Well, it would have been hard for it to look worse! Do you want to see that yellow sign in the wicker basket? Here you go:

The Girl said it was mean, but I think that taking my things without permission and trashing them is pretty mean, so I we'll call it even. Also, I drew a smiley face to keep it from being too harsh. That reminds me that when my father-in-law was a professor his students called him the "smiling assassin."

Back to the room, I think that one of the reasons that this room gets so little respect is that I don't like it that much. I picked the color when we were renovating and I just couldn't figure out what I really wanted. So, I think I really need to pick a new paint color. Also, I hate to say it because it was a very sweet hand-me-down from my in-laws and probably cost a mint, but I'm just not feeling the glass-topped table. It's really not my style. I'm sure that someone with a better eye and imagination could figure out a way to repurpose it, but the only thing I can think to do is to throw a table cloth over it. Do y'all have any suggestions? And the slipcovers on those chairs are totally ill-fitting, but I wrecked the original slipcovers when I tried to dye them. Oh, if I'd only had the blog, what a post that could have been! So, to replace the ruined ones, I bought those from Overstock.com. Again, if I were handy I'd be able to reverse-engineer the old slipcovers, buy some fabric, and whip up some new ones. You know what they say, "If 'ifs' and 'ands' were pots and pans there'd be no work for tinkers" or something like that.

So, here's my New Year's resolution (a little early). By next year I would like to fix up this room so that next Thanksgiving I really like it.

Please check out the blog early next week when I will have some discounts for folks in the Atlanta/Decatur vicinity that I hope you won't need to use. What? Are you intrigued? I hope so!