Reply To: Culling The Pile…

[warzanKeymaster 31125xp 1]

Ohh I have been feeling this exact thing over the last weeks!

It was exacerbated by a conversation with Andrea, when I was telling her my Mums family had 8 children and 2 parents living in a 3 bed council house almost exactly the size of our little house in Castlerock where during the pandemic we wondered how on earth we’d ever manage to live there when Savanna and the 3 boys would get to their teens. So we moved to the arse end of nowhere into this big old place.

Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love it here and have enjoyed every moment of working on it and fixing it up, and with the way the world is headed this may end up being one of those old timey multigenerational homes if our kids struggle to get housing.

But with all the additional space we have grandually been unpacking all the crap Ive gathered up over the years, and yes Ive added some crap since we got here too.

But Andrea couldn’t believe that 10 people all lived in the one little house so I phoned my mum to ask if there was a point where they were all in there or did marriages etc mean there was never a full house. Turns out nope, they all lived there all the boys in one room, the girls in another and one room for the parents.

Then she said somthing that hit me like a bag of bricks, “Warren, remember folks really didn’t have anything, not like today where you have stuff all over the place, we didn’t have a lot of clothes and bed rooms were just for sleeping in, we basically lived out side”

My own childhood was not dissimilar although already by that stage I had more ‘stuff’ than my parents ever had (my fathers household was 9 people)

And then I thought about all the stuff I have accumulated and just had this awful sense of dread and almost feeling like I was drowning in it. I thought, if I pop my cloggs tomorrow, what on earth would andrea and the kids even do with it all, some has value but only to the right people and they are unlikely to be ever able to manage working that out.

So we have been thinking along similar lines.

We have an old cottage just behind the house here that I was planning on turning into little music rooms, but now we are gonna demolish it. There is already a godly amount of space here, and more of it will just compound the problem.

So I feel you mate, I don’t have any answers, but Im interested to see what other folk are feeling on this! 🙂

Thanks for sharing!