Me in squalor

In about a year’s time or so I’ll have settled into my new home minus my wife Susan. If I live in a clean house, then I will know that perhaps I wasn’t the problem. If I live in squalor-like conditions then I will know that the problem was me, or partially me. I’m not sure yet how that will pan out. I’m not sure how much responsibility I have for our current living conditions.
We live in a highly affluent area just twenty minutes from one of Ireland’s main cities. Houses are nice. House prices are insane. People drive nice cars. Our house is filthy. It is a fixer-upper. It’s not fixed up. Showers leak. There’s a mold problem in one room (due to rain leaking into the cavity from somewhere on the gable end of the house). One bathroom is dismantled and filled with junk (and some tools). The work we did get done is low quality. Fixtures and fittings are meh at best. There’s moss on the roof. The driveway is overrun with grass, moss and weeds. The oven and hob are regularly splattered with sauce. Counter-tops get the same treatment. The floors are dusty. There are bags and junk in the kitchen just thrown on top of a flatpack chest of drawers that is a) falling apart and b) has no place in a kitchen. The windows are often filthy. Some double-glazing in some of them is shot. Two windows don’t open. Two exterior doors are drafty as hell. Paint is chipped off the stairs bannister. The stairs themselves are at “builders finish” standard awaiting decoration. All wardrobes are full to capacity with clothes that will never be worn. The drain pipe from the kitchen is ill-fitted outside and despite regular maintenance from me stinks some of the time. The houses around us are immaculate and worth a fortune.

I sleep upstairs (and have done so for years now) in a creaky old single bed in a room with only paint-splashed plywood for flooring. No baseboards just spray foam punctuating where the walls meet the floor. Some of my clothes reside in trash bags at the back of a wardrobe. They were put there during a discard phase and I do not have the heart to deal with them.

You would think we would have fixed up the house?

We’ve been literally ten years talking about fixing up bathrooms. We haven’t done it. We’ve been talking about surfacing the driveway for ten years, we haven’t done it.

Here are some facts:

• Our plumber won’t come to us. I think he thinks we’re daft as brushes. He might be right.
• Another plumber was rejected.
• And so was another.
• I have painted parts of the house, both inside and out more than once. I have received furious rage for doing that.
• We had a potential driveway marked out for surfacing, we were quoted, we were ready. It didn’t happen.
• Pictures have been flung from walls taking chunks of paint with them.
• Susan insists on keeping her childhood athletics trophies on prominent display in the living room. They haven’t been cleaned since she was a child.
• Display shelves in the sitting room are overloaded with junk.
• Old clothes cannot be given to charity or recycled by order of rage.
• I do a certain amount of cleaning and maintenance in the house (i.e fixing dripping taps and such stuff).
• Once upon a time I had dreams of having a nice house.
• I feel nothing but shame now for having even tried.

It is very hard to fully explain why we live in squalor. I haven’t quite figured that out yet. It’s hard to pin point specific reasons why we live like we do. I guess it’s death by a thousand cuts.