One would imagine that having a purpose-built craft room added to the house would be a wellspring of endless joy.
Wouldn’t one?
Well, this one did, erroneously, as it turns out.
One had fondly imagined all the junk shut away in the purpose-built cupboards, designed by one to be not taller than one so one could put all one’s dolls’ houses on the top, decoratively, and one thought it would be tidy and all the junk would be out of sight.
What one forgot was that one’s…………let us call it creativity……had filled two downstairs rooms, a spare bedroom, a shed, the space under the stairs and the garage. In some places the creativity, let us name it that, reached the ceiling in piles. Creative piles.
One does porcelain, sculpting, papercraft, cardmaking, dolls’ housering, quilting, dressmaking, writing, scrapbooking and gardening and one expected all of that to fit in one room?
One is a bit deranged, one surmises.
One also wanted one’s craft room to be perfectly organised prior to moving in.
A perfectionist clutter creator. No wonder I’m a bit conflicted.
Also, since the builders left I have spent three straight weeks tidying up. It was so bad I had to stop in the middle and make thirty cards in the spare bedroom.
I have in the past known folk who lived in a castle. It had many, many rooms on numerous floors and in turrets and extensive cellars. Ancestors had developed the interesting habit of closing a room that was full and moving to a room that was empty. In a hundred years they reopened the closed room. For lo! The contents had become valuable antiques, which, despatched to a sale room, funded the building of a new wing, full of empty rooms.
I would follow this model were I in the same league of aristocratic spending. What, alas, I am buying are lumps of clay that go mouldy, endless packs of paper (I have sooooooooooooooo much paper), acres of little bits of fabric just this big and a block of stone that’s going to take three strong man to lift it on to the reinforced table thingy so I can beat it up with a chisel and mallet.
Lock that lot away for a hundred years and you could clear it easily with a bulldozer without losing as much as a penny of value.
There were some friends of my parents, long gone, teachers both. Two active minds in the same house had collected everything, tried everything and had artefacts pertaining to photography, (still, film and antique) books and bookbinding, ancient (place the name of any civilisation here), husbandry of livestock, bees, every type of art and print making, publishing and an aviary full of interestingly bred birds. Naturally I loved them and found them fascinating. Their house was a massive Regency mansion, it needed to be.
I could, of course just give or throw everything away. I could have no possessions and no worries. Australian Zen.
The S&H will find a note upon my demise.
It will say: Get a bulldozer, clear the rooms, sell the house.
I will never get to space, the final frontier. I think too much.
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