cool life hack, apparently - so the area over my garage used to be my sister's and my room when we were kids, but when my mom died i took over her old room and when my dad died the above-garage room got shoved full of all the stuff from his house that i didn't know what to do with
and it's a part of the house that's very easy to ignore, so i just... never went in there; it's on a separate heating zone so i don't even heat it
but for a whole-ass decade i was always low-key beating myself up over how awful the state of it was; i didn't even want to think about it because i was ashamed and disgusted with myself about how gross and hoarder-y i'd let one of the bedrooms in my house become
until i mentally reclassified it as an attic instead of a bedroom
perfect
attics are meant for storing stuff
and now i'm like "sure, whatever, i'll post a pic; i know tons of people whose attics are WAY worse than this"
(I wish I had an attic)
(the most unatticlike thing is the fucking wall-to-wall carpeting)
and without the shame and with some distance, i've actually been working on it!
You can see the floor and the walls - most of them even - 3/10, not hoardy enough to scream hoarder.
(Let's not discuss the basement of the house I grew up in and I mom still lives in, at least at points)
the floors are legit awful (note the 10-year-old dog hair) and it saw at least one mouse infestation (now long since eradicated), but it is so easy to go "well it could be worse" when i'm thinking of it as """a storage area"""
oof, messy basements are the most stressful to deal with because it's so easy to add mold into the mix 
I have hoarding tendencies and regularly have to whirlwind through my house picking up and throwing away so I don't turn into my paternal grandfather
but yeah, sometimes shifting our mental categorizations makes tackling things so much easier
I'm glad you had a good mental shift for this room!
(which doesn't look bad at all)
...you saw the very tail end of my whirlwind when you arrived early for my birthday, Iddy, ha!
I had done most of the work around the house but was still whirlwinding through the craft room
we truly are our own worst critics because i still think it looks very bad, i just think it's more socially acceptable for an attic to be a horrorshow and so i feel less ashamed about its badness
whereas i think your house is very nice and clean and any mess is clearly a part of its homeyness rather than anything out of control
...you had NOT seen my house a week before
It was epically bad, especially my room
I had COVID for half of July and my room was my quarantine zone, so I did... nothing....... and also spent almost every waking second in my bedroom. I had to pack up 3+ bags of garbage and truly a mountain of dirty clothes and so many dirty dishes before I even made it to tidying the rest of the house.
it cleaned up nicely, though!
oh and another thing that's legitimately helped me: deciding not to care about some things has helped me feel less overwhelmed in tackling the things i do care about
the doors have been falling off my seventies-ass kitchen cupboards for pretty much forever; i thought it looked sloppy and that everyone would judge me
kitchen cabinets without doors - Google Searchbut look at all these kitchens where the doorless cabinets were by design
why should i give a fuck
it's not making my life worse, it's not making the house more difficult to live in, it's not unsanitary or dangerous in any way
it probably makes the dishes more likely to get dusty if they aren't used frequently, but if i notice dusty dishes i can wash them and dust out the cabinet space, nbd
mine do have the hinges still attached so you can tell this wasn't by design, but in the grand scheme of things that is nbd
Attic!!!
attic
and i don't even have to use a ladder to get to it when i'm sorting through it! how convenient
That sort of mental load is why for me it feels easier to clean someone else’s house than my own
good mental recategorizing!
Prime is correct. There's so much more emotional baggage in our own spaces
Same hat re: cleaning other people's spaces
oh god yeah same. keeping clients' houses tidy is so much less fraught lmao
a shitty flowchart to express my feelings
A good flowchart
god, yeah, cleaning the kids' place is so much easier
an excellent flowchart
I have some boxes up here in my flat, some standing around for years. They need to go to the basement.
But my basement is full since I moved in 24 years ago. A lot of it just cardboard boxes filled with paper and... more cardboard boxes. It all could go... but I can't arse myself into cleaning it out.
mooood