Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

I finally, finally got my hideous tub refinished:

Damn paint got everywhere, though.  I’ll have to pick up some lacquer thinner to clean up the floor tomorrow.

Is the tile not a lovely shade of green?  I suppose I’m lucky that I didn’t get the other color I’ve seen in the building, a peachy pink.  While the tub itself is fabulously deep and oversized (I can actually have my legs straight *and* have my torso under at the same time), it was originally burgundy.*  The tub was painted when I bought the place, but the paint chipped away over the years, until I had to refinish it in order to be able to sell.  Unfortunately, I tried to strip the paint off before starting, which was a mistake.  The tub looked something like a cranberry bean, albeit without that much white left, after I gave up on the stripping.

Painting it white really brightens the room.  The burgundy tub (which was also chipped, so that the iron was showing) was sort of a light-sucker.

Incidentally, the paint color you see on the steam pipe I got from an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.  The Fab 5, in an early episode, worked on one of their production assistants, and one of the rooms that Thom redid was his bathroom, which had this exact color tile.  So I made a point of looking up the product info on the website and using that color when I painted the walls.

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* Did I think to take a picture of it before I started?  I did not.   But just imagine burgundy against that green.   The whole building had those burgundy fixtures originally.  They must have fallen off a truck back in 1938.

I have piles of crap in my apartment, piles of clutter and shit that I haven’t even looked at since I moved in 6 years ago.  My dining table has been unusable for many moons because of the piled-up crap sitting on top of it, and it’s not really helping the general level of dirt in here that I can’t actually really clean because I have piled-up crap everywhere.

And this is after a general decluttering that took place about six months ago, during which I got rid of something like half my books and all of my VHS tapes and about 9 bags of clothes and shoes that I don’t wear anymore or just don’t fit into (my friend Rosalyn from law school made out; she’s now the size I was when I had to wear a suit to the office every day, so I sent her two sizable boxes of work clothes).  But it still wasn’t enough.

I’d ask where all this shit keeps coming from, but I already know the answer: that would be me.  The pets leave a lot of hair, but the clutter is all on me.

Not only do I need to declutter in order to sell my apartment, I need to declutter to get my shit together.  I can’t tell you how much time I spend on the weekends stressed out about my clutter, feeling like I need to do something about it, and then feeling guilty because the most I manage to do is get the laundry done and clean up the kitchen and bathroom.  If that.

Why am I doing this to myself?

So I started rearranging some of the piles today.  Given that I’ve got a little attention problem, I’m taking it one surface or one item of furniture at a time, pulling all the crap off the item, sorting into keep/give away/toss/recycle/shred/file piles (the file pile is going to be scary in and of itself, but I’m saving that for last), then cleaning and dusting.  I’ve already got the dining table, one of the end tables, and the dresser where I keep the TV cleared off, and now I’m working on clearing out the drawers of the dresser, which are crammed with more crap.

I may not finish today, but at least I’m finally getting underway.