We’re expecting a house guest later in the week, and my mom is making plans to come visit in the middle of the summer, so I’m thinking now is as good a time as any to get started sorting out the guest room.  The thing is, unfortunately, the room in question actually isn’t a guest room at all, except for in our dreams.  Really it’s the room left empty when Olof moved his office into a different room a couple of years ago.

Well, “empty and empty,” as they say in Swedish.  If only.

What it is, in fact, is a catch-all storage-slash-junk-room, and “catch-all” truly is an apt description, because it’s the space that catches all the odds and ends we don’t know what to do with whenever we make an attempt at tidying up the rest of the house.  It’s so full of these odds and ends that I had to shift away at least three boxes and twice as many bags before I could even get in the door.  These are pictures I took *after* I’d spent a half-hour or so clearing a path through the middle and sorting through mountains of laundry that, if I recall correctly, was clean when I tossed it in there.

Most of what’s in there is laundry, actually.  It should be easy enough to clear away, then, but some of it has been there so long that I hardly recognize it, let alone know where else to put it.  See, last summer we took out the bank of cabinets in the bathroom to make room for a tub, and all the laundry that was piled on the countertop had to go somewhere, right?  And then, after I’d thrown laundry in there once, it seemed a good enough idea to do it again.  And again.  Why is it that a good habit takes three weeks to establish–that’s what the experts tell me, at any rate–but a bad habit can be formed almost instantaneously?

Anyway, what little time I spent in there was discouraging enough that I’ve already put the project off for another day.  After all, last time Helena was here she stayed in that room, and it’s surely not any worse now than it was then (I did, for the record, fill up and set aside four bags of clothes to go the Salvation Army, so that’s at least a bit of the clutter gone).  I would like for it to be done when my mom comes, but that’s a couple of months away, and besides, I’m thinking I can set Lydia to the task once school’s out and she starts moaning, “I’m boo-oored” every other minute.  If she’s lucky, I might even throw her a couple of hundred kronor for good measure.