How many of you waste many hours browsing Pinterest, pinning photos and pictures of things that you like the look of, ideas you could use at home, recipes, fashion inspiration, holiday suggestions and the like? *Holds up my hand.* Yes, I am a Pinterest addict. It becomes quite a problem at times, and I have had to reign it in a little. But it is like all the other social media networks. Once you start, you simply cannot stop. Especially when they send you emails with suggestions of boards you might like to look at, and pins you may not have seen yet. I can never quite bring myself to cancel the email subscription…

I realised recently just what a lie Pinterest actually is. I have been looking for ideas to help me improve the storage situation in my home. We live in a reasonably sized two-bed terraced house. We are rapidly outgrowing it, but we are not in a position to be able to move to a larger house, or to extend and renovate our current one, which it desperately needs. You see, our house is old. It was built in 1896, and I think it was a former railway worker’s cottage. We have two double bedrooms, but one is filled with a single bed and a cot, and both still have the old chimney breast in place, which affects the space we have for furniture. So, something like this pin, for example, could never really work in my house:

And then there is the downstairs. We have a living/dining room that resembles more of a playroom and general rubbish heap at the moment. There are toys everywhere, and as much as I try and put them upstairs in the girls’ bedroom, they keep finding their way back down again. We seem to be overrun by shoes that will not stay in the cupboard I have allocated, and our only space for the pushchair is in a corner of our living room, since we have no proper shed or garage that we could use, and we have no front garden or porch. It makes no sense for me to fold down the pushchair because we use it every day, and it is a cumbersome item to wrestle with. And we still have the highchair in use, which also takes up half of the room. Sigh.

Finally, there is my kitchen. It is tiny, because back in the old days, they didn’t have appliances, plastic tableware, an assortment of cooking implements, and packets, bottles and tins of food to store. Now my kitchen is stuffed full, and try as I might, I simply cannot get rid of any more stuff. I could make use of a food mixer, but I have nowhere to store it, so for now I have to use a whisk when we do baking. I would love a coffee machine, but again, there is no space. I received a George Foreman grill for Christmas a while back, and I have to move it around the kitchen, and sometimes out to the dining room table, just to clear enough space to prepare food or do what is required. I saw this idea for a laundry space on Pinterest recently, and although it looks beautiful and clean and efficient, it is a lie!

I don’t even have room for a laundry zone in my house. We have a washing machine squashed into the kitchen, a washing line in the back garden that extends out into our shared alleyway, and when the weather is bad, my clothes fill up a folding airer in our bedroom. But you know what? I finally realise that it doesn’t matter. Pinterest simply gives us ideas. It gives us something to aspire to. I admit, for a while I was feeling quite depressed that I couldn’t recreate these beautiful, clean, fresh house ideas. But then I remembered, I have young children. My house will not be clean and tidy for at least another two years yet. But it is clean enough for us to live in. We have fun. We love each other. We are healthy. We are happy. So I will reserve Pinterest as a suggestion for the future, when I can afford a larger house and keep it in just the way I would like. The possibilities are endless…

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