I finally made it over to the new boards. This place looks great!
I was Scribbly Bits over on the old boards, but needed to change the name a little over here. I had just started posting on the old forum, but I lurked for about 4 years before that.
A brief summary: Squalor hit about 8 years ago, during a time of transition and big changes for me. Four years ago, I found this Squalor Survivors. I have been clawing my way out of squalor ever since. I'm at about .5 - 1 degree in every room right now, except the bathroom which has been at 0 for months.
I hope to start contributing a bit more. I owe so much to Squalor Survivors, Pigpen and all the SS members. It would be nice to give a little back.
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Here is my saga, as I posted it on the old boards.
I've been coming here for a few years. I've received so much help from all of you, even though I didn't post. Reading about your struggles and successes has helped me so much. I figure it's about time I started participating with the rest of you.
I sank into squalor slowly, over the course of several years. My mom died. I started grad school, which meant moving away from family and friends. I didn't do as well as I wanted to in school. I was overwhelmed by the school work and not having close friends nearby.
It got to the point where I simply couldn't make some decisions. I'd order a book I needed for school from the internet. When it came, I literally didn't know what to do with the box and packaging. So the boxes started to pile up.
I moved a lot, trying to find a cheaper place to stay. Then I started housesitting for professors. The professor would get a sabbatical and go to England or France; I would stay in their house and take care of the pets. That's when the real problems started.
Looking back, it was very difficult for me to fit into someone else's house. Their systems were not my systems. The kitchen wasn't arranged the way I would have done it. My file cabinet was in storage, so my papers were everywhere. They would clear out two shelves for my books. I have boxes and boxes and boxes of books. I couldn't decide which to store and which to keep.
When I finally got a real job and an apartment, I took all my things out of storage. I was overwhelmed by them all. That apartment was definitely the messiest place I have ever lived in. First, it was a small apartment with very little storage. One closet. One. In the bedroom. It was small. No linen closet, no front hall closet, no coat closet. The kitchen had some large cabinets, but most of the space was wasted because you couldn't fill the cabinets. If you did, you would never get the stuff stored in the back on the bottom out again. And the kitchen, while it looked charming, had possibly the worst layout of any kitchen in the US.
I had boxes of stuff everywhere. I got the kitchen unpacked and most of my clothes unpacked and then I froze. For over a year, there was a heap of clothes and papers and just stuff on my bedroom floor. I could walk around the bed and to the closet. I couldn't open the bottom dresser drawer without a struggle, because of the heap of stuff.
The living room had boxes and heaps of paper everywhere. I had a tiny little "extra" room, with no windows. It was supposed to be my study, but even when I got bookshelves and unpacked some of my books, it was still a mess. I didn't have enough shelves; I had too many books.
Just about every surface was covered with papers of every kind. I would buy things and just drop the bags by the front door. At one point, I tried just to clear off the coffee table every night. Usually, it was piled one or two feet high with junk. For a whole week, I cleared that table off every night. It would take me half an hour to an hour. That was because nothing had a home, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where things would go. It was so tiring. I only lasted a week with that.
I hated living like this. I didn't know why things had changed. I used to do the laundry every Saturday morning. Then I would clean the bathroom. Things got dusty sometimes, but they weren't messy, messy, messy.
The first thing I did in that horrible apartment was to clear off the mantlepiece in the living room. It had all sorts of stuff on it--tools, papers, cat treats. I put some nice candle sticks and a vase on it. I even turned the chair I sat in most so that I could see this one little oasis in the sea of clutter.
Then I bought an armoire for the living room. Finally, a place to put my coats and hide the vacuum cleaner! This opened up a lot of space in the bedroom closet. Then I tackled the heap of stuff on the bedroom floor and either tossed it or found a home for it.
While I was living there, I discovered this site. It was a huge relief to know that I was not the only person on the face of the earth who was bewildered and confused by the mess that surrounded them.
I was in that apartment for 5 years. At the worst, it was a solid level 2 everywhere. When I moved out, the little "extra" room was still a 2, but the living room and kitchen were a 1 and the bedroom and bathroom were a 0.
The next apartment got messy at times. The dining table was out of commission most of the time. But I never got more than a 1 and usually not the whole apartment at the same time. It was a great place, a huge loft, all one room, with, thankfully, a separate kitchen. I had enough space for once. I realized that part of the problem in the other apartment wasn't me, it was the space. There wasn't enough space and what there was, wasn't well designed.
But my job got to be too much. I was working 60-70 hour weeks at work and sometimes bringing work home. My boss kept telling me I wasn't working hard enough and finally gave me the choice of leaving or taking a demotion. I left. She was not happy, somehow she thought I'd want to stay, but I was beginning to realize that the job and the company were not treating any employees very well.
I moved again last fall, to be closer to my family and to be near a big city, where the chances of getting a job would be better. I don't have a job yet and I am very concerned about that. I spend a lot of time on-line looking. Also, my father died last summer, so I am dealing with that. And also with a lot of stuff from his house. I had to help my sister go through everything in the house. Our brother is the executor of the estate and he just wanted to throw everything out. We needed to go through all the papers and make sure that all our siblings had everything they wanted out of the house first.
So when I moved, I also moved in several boxes and pieces of furniture from Dad's house. Dad had gone through lots of stuff in the last 10 years. He had prepared several boxes for all of us, with our old school papers, pictures, report cards as well as things from Mom and Dad.
So it took me a while to unpack and sort things. Some of Dad's boxes I have just stashed against a wall in the dining room because I am just not ready to go through them now. One of my brothers has been very critical, because, since I'm unemployed, I should have had everything unpacked and sorted out right away.
I lost some things over the last move because I left them in my old apartment's storage area. I cleared this with the landlord and payed him extra rent for the space for a month. But he cleared it out after a week. He "forgot" that we had made the arrangement. All my Christmas things were in there. That hurt.
Thanks to all the help I have received from this site, this apartment is in pretty good shape. The living room is a 0, the bedroom is .5, the kitchen is a 0 (I'm so proud of that; it's hard for me to keep that straight); the bathroom is a 0 and the dining room, well, the dining room is a mess. A solid 2. But I'm working on it. Just very slowly.
I now need to learn how to maintain. I knew how once upon a time. But now I need to learn a new way to maintain that will work for me. I am hoping that this time of unemployment can be used to create new habits that will work when I start working again. Today I vacuumed for the first time in 2 months. With two cats, I need to vacuum a bit more often!
So I just wanted to say Hi! to everyone. Wave [
]I feel as if I know you, having read your posts for a couple of years now. I want to say "Thank you." You didn't know it, but you have been helping me claw my way out of squalor.