Housework

[poliphilo]

The house- abandoned in the middle of its makeover- looks like a newly excavated Pompeiian villa. 

But I'm very good at editing out information I don't want to engage with.  Mess- what mess?

And I'm hopeless at housework. Some people can just whisk round a room and it looks great; I plod round a room and it looks exactly as it did before.

I wouldn't know where to start.

I dream of living in a vast, white, minimalist apartment: Gleaming wood floors, no ornaments, furniture from the Bauhaus, a single late-period Picasso on the wall, windows looking out from a great height over a  rainy northern city...

I put this apartment into a story once and the first thing my heroine did- being a surrogate for me- was to cover the floor with an enormous toy train set, complete with houses and bridges and hundreds of little people.

Comments

dream of living in a vast, white, minimalist apartment

[baritonejeff.livejournal.com]

You had me at "vast."

Re: dream of living in a vast, white, minimalist apartment

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It needs to be vast to accomodate the train set...

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Aw, Tony, I loved every word of this post.

Perhaps partly--surely partly--because I am exactly the same: I yearn for empty rooms with one lime in a white dish on a gleaming counter and all the furniture in walls that open out on demand, but I really want Victorian clutter all around me to close in the room.

Right now my living room--the entire house--is so clean and dustless that I almost hate it! I need more junk! But I had to go and throw it all away. Boy, am I sorry now...

I miss my candles and pinecones and thousand books and four bookcases I gave away...what was I thinking?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

But now you have the fun of going out and collecting more stuff.

Out with the old, in with the new.

That's what Elton John does. He buys and buys and buys until his houses are full to bursting, then he auctions everything off and starts again.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

There was a man who auctioned off on eBay every single thing he owned, even down to "box of paperclips."

Just imagine the shipping and packaging, the trips to the post office!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There was an artist a few years back who shredded absolutely everything he owned.

I love that kind of grand gesture. It's the sort of thing St Francis might have done.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I've lost everything three times, and by the third time I came to love having nothing, making do.

I miss it!

One of my favorite stories to make up as I walk along is to pretend it's post WW III and I must live in some burned-out old building, and it contains only a table, a window, a rug.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's that Robinson Crusoe thing, isn't it?

We went round the shop today, working out just what we could afford on our budget, picking things up, putting them back, crowing over bargains- and it was a whole lot of fun.