Have you ever been in a situation where you ignore a problem in the hopes that it will just go away? I think we’re all guilty of this behavior. Some of us do it in our relationships, some of us do it in our work life, and some turn a blind eye toward annoying things in our lives that really aren’t that hard to remedy. It’s all a matter of getting started.
I’m finally addressing a space in my house that I have been turning a blind eye toward for the last 13.5 years. Yeah, it really has been that long. It is a closet that has developed a life of its own. When we built our house we didn’t put any shelves or clothing rods in it. We wired it with 220 so that “someday” we could put in a sauna. In the meantime it has become the junk collector. Too big to fit elsewhere? Stuff it into the closet. Boxes, suitcases, a monstrous wall hanging bookshelf was even sitting on the floor (sadly, it was filled with books).
This weekend I came to terms that the day when a sauna gets installed sadly will never come. We already have a hot tub, and we don’t use it as much as we could, I can’t imagine sinking money into a sauna too. Besides, we are getting close to pulling the trigger on selling our home and moving to something that requires less maintenance. No point in spending a boatload of money.
I managed to talk my husband into building out the closet from scratch. He did a wonderful job. Once the shelves were in place I took over. All that stuff has a shiny new coat of white paint on it now and the caulking is done. Tomorrow I’ll hopefully be able to paint the walls and then we can move all of his clothes out of the closet we are currently sharing. Wow, we’ll each have a closet of our own. I guess once we do that I should paint “my” closet too – it hasn’t been done for 13 years either and I don’t want something else that I am turning a blind eye toward.
The funny part is that I’ve been ignoring this for years and it has been grating on me. I should have the situation resolved within 4 days of being at home. It didn’t take 4 days – in fact it only took a couple of hours each day (except for Saturday when the emptying, building, and installing occurred). It is amazing how much of my energy was spent elsewhere when I could have fixed the situation with a few well chosen hours of work.
