As I was working on the guest house threshold (scraping and painting it, since I was working on the porch walls next), my mom told me to go look at the new flooring. While I was in the guest house, I saw multiple places where my mom missed painting. Most egregious was the dark hanger scuffs in the closet and nasty food stains and smudges in the walk-in pantry. I said fuck it, I'll fix it, because we're asking for a lot more in rent due to all the renovations recently and in the past year. I also firmly believe that, if you're renting and you see all the nasty old house features and believe that you're living in a shithole, you will treat your living space as a shithole. And the last thing we need is for someone to trash the place again. It's like if you walk into a fancy office you're like, ooh this is nice I gotta be on good behavior. Obviously people are nasty and don't always adhere to that pattern, but I really believe that this is reasonable logic I've observed. Paint over the egregious old scuffs. Simple.
I finish painting the threshold and go to finish the guest house yard side of the treebush. I end up chainsawing my arm. The gash is highly triggering to look at but nothing serious and I'm still treating it safely at home. The treebush looks amazing and is evenly shaped and diseased braches were almost all removed. I will still need to do our house side of the fence, but that's a job for later since we have a backlog of tasks. That same night I fuck up my adobo I spent days preparing for. Horrible day.
Next day, I paint the closet.
Next day my aunt comes over and we show her the progress. I see how gross the pantry is and mention how I'll have to do more painting still. My aunt says something like, "Well don't do too much, you don't want the nice things in this house, you should have the nice things in your house." Fucking evil. All of them. She refuses to back me up on how 'if you believe you're living in a shithole, you'll treat it like a shithole' - I said look at how our own house is! And she refused to see it as the truth it is. Our house is in a bad state, and continues to deteriorate because of it. 'Oh, that wooden counter is bad, I'm not cleaning up what I just spilled' and then I end up having to clean for ages before I can cook anything. I hate it here. I hate all these people. They have no basic human compassion or decency, no integrity, no pride in doing a job well-done. I rage silently the entire time my aunt was here.
Next day I work on painting the pantry walls and find a spot where some rotten vegetable or fruit went moldy and ate through a pantry board on the bottom corner shelf. I make the suggestion to just remove that board: and since it's a short one on the bottom corner, it would be great to have space for storage of a larger item (like the step-stool left by the previous tenant would fit perfectly) and that board would not be missed. I have my mom relay this to my grandpa since I'm covered in paint.
While I'm still painting, my grandpa walks in and I try to explain what happened and what needs to be done, but he doesn't even look at or acknowledge me, just walks in and goes to look under the board. I keep commentating, and he says nothing. He gets up. He willfully determines that it is not mold damage, saying that I am entitled to my opinion, but nothing will be done to the board. He also wrongly claims that mold is just mushrooms, whatever the fuck that means, since it's not safe to have unknown mushrooms growing off household fixtures either. He brings up drama that happened from before I was born, since everything wrong with this country stems from the fact that his ex-wife was granted a divorce. He insults my work by saying I'm doing too much, and outright laughs at my concerns. I ask how is he not embarrassed by the state of this pantry - dried maggot pupa/exuvia, cobwebs, fly poop, unknown stains which could realistically be blood or dead animal decay, mold, etc. He says he is not embarrassed at all, and that my mom already claimed the pantry was good to go. It took every fucking ounce of self control to not dump the entire paint can all over the new flooring in retaliation of the amount of disrespect I was getting. I was so mad I was shaking, but I held the paint can still. Big argument. I continue painting while crying. I decide I will do only what I promised and stop. (I promised to do the porch, the pantry painting, touch up the cupboards [just give them a little clean and mineral oil, nothing time consuming], and putting carpet in a small 3x4' closet.)
Today, I go to evict the spiders, taking them outside with a cup, and dust the cobwebs. As I'm doing that, I realize my grandpa just finished painting a part of the porch that had not been scraped yet (on the side I bumped down in priority because my family is already taking about renting, so I had to rush to do the indoor painting before the place gets shown).
My grandpa insists that my mom said the porch was scraped, therefore it is ready to be painted, ignoring the facts that the paint on that could be pulled off by hand it was so loose, and that while my mom said it was scraped, it was not actually scraped. He did that today, without telling me beforehand, specifically, to spite me over the argument about the mold. I asked why he would do it when I said I would do it, when there are more important things indoors consuming my time due to the shitty job done before, and other more serious things inside the house that need to be done. He said he 'got tired of looking at it.' A pathetic excuse. I wish he would just come out and say that he hates me. He is a horrible excuse of a human being. It was a whole huge argument and I was shaking with rage. He sarcastically says we need to communicate like a team - and I snap back about how he never communicated to me about painting the porch. I hate him so much.
I just had to go in and finish painting the pantry, full on meltdown mode. I decided I would only do the pantry and carpet (since the nail tacks were sticking up on the subfloor, it was not safe to leave [they were planning on leaving it, even though the stench of decay was coming up through the subfloor in that closet], and I have the correct staple gun for the spare carpet padding I have, and there was enough new carpet scraps to Frankenstein it for coverage). And I am doing these ONLY for the sake of the future renters, not as a favour to my family.
I painted over the dessicated mold (because my mom didn't even cover it completely with paint, and didn't even touch the underside). I got on my fucking belly and covered that whole board underside in a thick coat of paint, so it is completely contained and not dropping spores. I was so temped to rip it out against my grandpa's decision, but I was having a multi-hour breakdown of nonstop crying and shaking while painting, and I was in no state to be packing a bag to be kicked out, not with other drama that happened earlier unrelated to me. I kept thinking about how I am one sentence away from being kicked out. How all three people have sided against me on very simple fixes to make the house look worthwhile for the price they want to ask. How I am spending all my fucking time all day long working on that house. How I am seriously injuring my body and getting nerve damage by doing this every fucking day without complaint. How this is a thankless task being done by a disabled person doing my best, and how my family ultimately does not appreciate it. How they don't care about the safety of me or of the future renters. How I am wasting my fucking time in that house and come back crying when I see how fast my dog is aging and I am not getting to spend any time with him because I am at the guest house all day. I regret ever moving back home, because these people are not my family. I can't transition/come out or I get kicked out. S.I. was high all day. And all the while, I hear my grandpa doing a shitty fucking hack job on the porch using the sander instead of a scraper - the sander doesn't work on removing the old paint completely, it needs to be scraped. He was doing this specifically to spite me over the arguments today and last night. There is no other reason to be doing anything on the porch right now. And this just makes me more upset. I was doing a good job on the porch. The railing and threshold and front door and screen door all look great. The other side is going to look like shit and start chipping after a year. Zero fucking logic. Zero fucking respect for the work I did and was planning to do. I have been working tirelessly every day, and what I get is that my help is entirely unwanted.
I have been kept out of the loop since day fucking one, which is why I was doing the porch since the start and didn't see the indoor painting issues until just a few days ago. I have been beautifying the yard. I have been doing the heavy lifting. And now I get disrespected beyond what I can handle as a human being. I have NEVER been so maliciously disrespected in my life.
I finish the pantry, I finish the carpet, and I get my things the fuck out. I am done. They can all do it all themselves. They can show future renters the delicious mystery stains in the kitchen. The tantalizing murder closet. The beast-clawed windows. The stench of mold and decay. I am too fucking embarrassed to be related to these evil people. I can not stand behind the quality of that house, so I am done, and will not help any more.
I bought and marinated chicken with the iffy leftover tepache (that I made for my failed turkey thigh adobo). I cooked that today and while it was in the oven I gorged myself on iffy old pineapple and a ton of ice cream. I went to pet my dog. I had another serious meltdown when I remember how little time I've spent with him. Sobbing and shaking so hard I couldn't eat the hot food. I made a plate to hopefully eat later, packed everything up, cleaned, and left to cry and type this out. I wish I took a picture because it looked so good, but I was shaking too hard.
I'm beyond upset. I don't even know how to process all this. I don't want to be here. Why am I even here. My family does not respect me as a human being, as one of the people who would logically take over care of the guest house in the future. I mean, fat chance I'm in the Will at all, but I am the last descendant on this side of my family, and I currently live on the property, and therefore can assist. And that apparently means nothing since I care a reasonable amount (which is caring too much to be 'one of them'). My 'opinions' are never respected, especially not when they are based on logic and safety.
Didn't you know? Mold is apparently both mushrooms and water damage at the same time (nevermind that there was no other 'water damage' on the shelf above). Fungus taxonomy doesn't matter when you're the toxicāmasculine patriarch to a family of women (and Cori). The landlord's word is God: the mold you see and smell is not mold. Science be damned.
And I'm not implying anything, but the way I'm treated so disrespectfully compared to my mom and aunt/s? Suspicious how I'm the only multiracial one. It probably doesn't help my case that I never bend the knee like my mom and goldenchild aunt. I'm never going to be one of them.
I'm just having a really bad fucking time.
Anyway, I don't think I can eat tonight, I better go put that plate and tupperwares of food away before it goes bad. I really need to rehydrate so I can cry more. I will be doing jack fucking shit from now on.
I'm also probably getting some bad health news/scan results next week since a canceled appointment got reinstated when they talked to the doctor about the importance (next available was months away, so I'm glad it's un-canceled, but the fact it was important enough to un-cancel sounds bad).
