I’m currently 6 months pregnant, I have been slowly asking him to take out old broken furniture , because I can’t lift anything. There is a dining room table that had all broken chairs, and is covered in paint and glue and glitter from our daughter. I had an old couch that was broken and flaking off black flakes all over our floor, I have an old toddler bed in our daughters room that is to small(I’m buying her a new one) and an old futon in our guest room that I wanted to sell because that’s our new baby nursery and we need room for the crib. I set up all the pick ups for everything, I just need him to help move them outside. Today he says he’s miserable because we can’t even have furniture in the house. He’s mad I wanted to sell the futon. The only reason we are getting rid of those things are because they are old, broken, and we don’t have space to store extra furniture we don’t use. He’s been complaining saying he feels like he has no room for his stuff in our house. We own a duplex, we love upstairs. We have 3 bedrooms, a dining room, living room, basement (not able to hang out in because it’s a dirt floor basement with asbestos) a mud room, and a kitchen. In our dining room, it’s mostly just empty with toys from my daughter, art stuff for her, and my husband’s guitar’s, speakers, and Warhammer stuff. Our living room is a living room. Our bedroom is currently covered floor to floor in my husband’s clothes. The guestroom was a playroom for our daughter, but now converting to a baby nursery. My husband smokes weed, I did too pre pregnancy, but he leaves his shit everywhere, pipes everywhere, jars of weed everywhere, papers, I told him, while I’m pregnant, I can’t stand the smell, and I’d prefer he didn’t smoke in the new baby nursery area, and def not in our daughters room. Usually he smokes in the kitchen with a window open, or the mudroom out back. We don’t have a ton of closet space, so I understand his position there, I have one closest downstairs, he used to have one downstairs too, but a few years back we moved it to the upstairs closet. The reason is the closests are in our living room, and he would just throw his clothes around the living room, shoes, socks, and I got tired of our living room being a laundry basket. He never used the one upstairs, so now, our bedroom floor has become his closet. I am ok with clearing out the shit and giving him back the old closet, but that’s not enough. He’s still saying he feels like he’s being pushed out. I don’t know what else he wants, I don’t have any of my shit anywhere in the house, we don’t have space. I have a makeup table in our room, and I have the one closest for my clothes. He wants to use the nursery as his music room to store all his stuff….I said no way, it would be a huge mess, and there would be no space for the new baby. What else can I do to compromise here ? For him, this is a serious concern, but I feel like, we are adults, we have kids, and our house isn’t huge, we just don’t have extra rooms to have for our own hobby stuff. He has the dining room right now for his music and figurines, but says it isn’t enough. I don’t know what else to do here.
Tl;Dr husband and me expecting 2nd baby, he claims he’s losing all the space in the house for his things
He’s 37, I’m 33, married 7 years, together around 13 years.
2 comments
He sounds like a slob and now you’re cleaning up and replacing, indeed, there’s less room for him to be a slob. Is his slobbishness something he wants to address?
Separate garbage and messy. The stuff you can throw away should be moved. But him throwing his stuff on the floor is not something you can cure. However, if you first take the garbage out, that’s a frustration that’s gone and you get some better view of what you can do with the rest of the space. Leave the futon for now.
Ask some other people to help you with the stuff you need to carry. It’s perhaps one day where you can hire a big truck and bring it all to the landfill. Surely there’s a strong teen neighbour who’d like to earn an extra buck in a weekend?
Then sit down and talk with him about what he wants. It sounds like he has potentially valuable collections, those are not for little fingers. Perhaps he should put stuff in storages. Also with instruments: are there no neighbours complaining about noises? He probably has more space if he cleans up some of the things and reorganizes what’s already there.
Make sure you get that drugs stuff in a special area that can be closed off. Your kids are within reach and that gets bonus punishments. Messy and unorganized aren’t that much of a problem, but safety is.
So your husband is a slob who clusters up his space and just wants to keep it this way. He has no space because he made it that way.
Do you have the extra cash to hire somebody to come in and declutter and reorganize?