There are not enough closets. There are not enough bookshelves. Closets and bookshelves are necessarily related.
It is NOT that we have too many clothes. No, it is not enough closets for clothes that a) have grown steadily bigger over the last thirty years and b) are required to do too many things (in my case, anyway.) I can't just have, as I did once upon a time, two pair of jeans that fit (one older than the other...when it got too raggedy for me, and I was not overy tolerant of raggedy, I bought one new pair) and four or five shirts. I'm now a professional person who must dress for things: conventions (I do not wear jeans to conventions--that reminds me to stand up straighter and be more tolerant), meetings of various kinds and Serious Appearances (universities, but also book tours, where I dress up more than at conventions except for the parties and not always then), and "concert blacks" for concerts. (Yes, our choir wears black at concerts--well, the men wear black tie; the women wear solid black.) I used to also need riding clothes (not jeans, not when jumping) so I have riding britches in the various sizes I've been and might be again.
Then there's my faulty temperature control, which means I need WARM things as well as cool things--warmer than any northerner thinks I need, but without which I turn blue and can't think. So rather than two pairs of jeans, four shirts, one jacket and one winter and one summer church outfit, I have...too many clothes for my side of the closet. For awhile I spread out into the whole thing, and Richard used a small closet off the kitchen, plus all the shelves in the bathroom cabinet (large).
But then I got the two big soup pots. That don't fit in any cabinet in the kitchen--and the kitchen, moreover, has no pantry. I have a metal cabinet out in the utility room serving as a pantry, but it's on the outside of the inner back door (that was once an outside door into a garage...) and that's inconvenient when the heat or the cold is on. So my inside food storage and my crockery and pots and all are jammed in anyhow, with things on the counter that I would really prefer not to have all over my workspace.
And there's the hall closet. Narrow, like the little pantry in the tiny kitchen I had in San Antonio (the whole house was 750 square feet and we loved it.) When not full of clothes, and the luggage that's been stored under the clothes, it will hold the nested big soup pots, and shelves could fit above that for things like the canned goods now stores in the inconvenient outer faroffistan metal cabinet.
Today, when I had many other things that needed doing, like messing with the Bach that I'm finding difficult, I got a bur under my blanket about fixing at least part of the closet thing. And started in, hating it because I hate doing this sort of thing. Hate, hate, hate, and it was dusty in the closet and so on. I took all my things out of one side and piled them on the bed, putting some into a sack for Goodwill. Closing my mind to what I'd paid for them, and how I felt about not fitting them anymore, resolutely sticking them in and not thinking about it. Sneezing. Coughing. Eyes burning. Then, when I was going to prune the other side of the closet to make room for the keepers, the blankety-blank sliding doors jammed. Jammed hard. I hate those sliding doors. You can't ever see the whole closet at once. I had bifold doors on a similar (but smaller) closet in San Antonio and that was much easier to deal with.
Long story short, I couldn't get into that side until Richard got home from a movie and unjammed it for me, which meant I could not surprise him with the nice uncluttered far side of the closet. Grump.
However: the closet-destined-for-pantryhood now has no clothes in it. Lots of non-fitting clothes (his and mine) are in sacks for Goodwill. My remaining clothes *barely* fit into my side of the closet if you don't look around and notice that some are still folded on the window seat which can't be sat on because it's been the place to stack folded clothes that can't jam in anywhere. .It's not big enough but I am not going to invade Richard's side of the closet again. What need to happen is that we somehow unpack the closets (and floors and so on) at the other house so that they can be used for off-season and for the things still in M's closet here...and when M's closet here is free, my overflow could go there, or Richard could have it to himself.
And the soup pots would not be where I bark my shins on them and they look less than fetching.
My back hurts, my eyes have dust in them, and 99,000 other things did not get done.
