Nesting Instinct

I'd be lying if I said that my nesting instinct only came out while I was pregnant. I've always enjoyed rearranging furniture and organizing items and decorating. I've always been hampered by a few things though.

The first thing is that I've never really owned furniture. Even right now, in our house, my husband and I own probably less than half of the furniture. To our names, we have an armchair (generously donated by his parents), a bed (generously donated by the trash), a mattress topper (generously donated by his old roommate) and a dining room table and chairs (generously donated by his sister). There a few other items, but the general gist is that there's not much to rearrange.

The second hampering is the items. The stuff. Though we don't have much furniture, my husband and I are both stuff-collectors. I'd like to say he's worse than I am, but the truth is we just have different niches. He has a lot of technology. I have clothes and costumes and books. Both of us have a hard time throwing out items that could be useful to someone, someday, somehow.

So there's a lot of Stuff that could be rearranged but due to the amount of stuff, there's not a lot of rearranging options.

Then there's decorating. Decorating is also hampered. First and foremost, I don't have the discretionary income needed to buy vases or pictures or anything that cannot be used in a, well, useful way. Second, we need all our space for The Stuff. There are no open surfaces that could use a decorate vase filled with decorative beads and maybe wrapped with a decorative ribbon, because it's covered in everything else.

But, oh. The nesting urges still hit, and hard. I'll spend a day rearranging the closet just to try to fit more stuff inside. I'll move our roommates couch at a 90 degree angle to try to open the living room. Once, I put decorative beads into a vase and wrapped it with ribbon. I put it on our dining room table. Later that evening, when our friends were over and we went to play a board game, someone took the decorative piece and kind of shoved it onto another surface.

They weren't being rude. There was just no point to having it there.

Yet, somehow, there's a point to having a pair of nail clippers on my desk, and a vial of perfume that I received as a gift, even though I only use it to anesthetize wounds because it is alcohol based. And a basket of papers that might be important, but aren't important enough to go into my "important stuff" drawer.

If you can make sense of my mind, I'd love to hear about it.