Feeling extremely lonely and despairing this evening. Long story I'm not sure I have the strength to type, but will try.
First off, I've been on MN a while, NCd a few times. Have tried to contribute support to various threads and have had some in return. I'm not a mum, I'm a gay man whose best friends' two young kids are like the niece and nephew I never had. Hence why I came on MN originally and have stayed.
I'm early 50s, single, live alone in a rented flat. I love it here but it has looked shabby and tired for ages and before I can start working from home I've felt a desperate need, for quite some time, to give the hallway and bedrooms a facelift. The sort of work I do, it would be too disruptive to clients for me to start a big decorating job once I've embarked on some work from home. I asked my landlords for permission to redecorate and they agreed but for whatever reason aren't contributing financially, so I'm using my savings. I've never done any painting/decorating in my life, having always rented and just not felt able to go down the path of the particular skillset required! I have some chronic health issues which these days mean I'll never be able to do anything like this for myself.
Hired a gay painter/decorator who lives a few miles away because it was an opportunity to support the 'pink economy'. His quote seemed a little on the dear side but he was able to start pretty much straightaway and so I hired him. At that point he told me he'd have a colleague who also was the driver. Within two days of starting he told me the colleague had been offered other work and he would be continuing the job alone. Started on the 4th of this month, said he aimed to be finished (except for 'snagging') by the 16th. I'd paid him a 20% deposit up front and by the 16th had paid almost 80% in dribs and drabs as asked for. (Now realise that's a no-no.) He was coming here on public transport on the days he turned up, often arriving very late because he had to go to B&Q or Wickes for various materials, and then only doing 4 or 5 hours work if I was lucky.
Then last Friday (16th) he went away for a long weekend, and I realised he had vastly underestimated what it would take to bring the job in on time. By this morning I was looking at two very unfinished bedrooms and a hallway he had barely made a start on, yet I've been sleeping in my living room for the last 3 weeks almost and most of the contents of the two bedrooms have been in here with me. The dust (and paint drips) through the kitchen and bathroom, the depressing sight of bedrooms half-finished for weeks with rubble and dust all over the carpets (I've ordered and paid for new carpets - another first for me - but can't arrange the fitting until I know the decorating is properly finished.) The bedroom radiators have been off the walls for weeks, the windows are filthy, he never cleans or tidies after himself and the hallway has been a dusty mess that I've given up on cleaning in the last few days. I've been depressed and anxious, made myself ill with worry. You know when it hits you that you can't turn off that panicky breathless feeling, the feeling that there's a bowling ball lodged in your solar plexus doesn't shift, and you're living on your nerves? The terror that my landlords would find out I've hired someone inconsistent and unreliable, who not only didn't finish my contract with him by last Friday but started another job elsewhere this Tuesday and has spent most of the week there, fitting my job in for 2 or 3 hours late afternoon/early evening. I got up this morning and just felt wretched, utterly bamboozled by the whole experience.
Had a long chat with an old friend over the phone this afternoon as I paced around the bedrooms noting all sorts of ropey examples of the poor work. He advised me to settle for a 'cosmetic' endgame, to try to get the most value out of the decorator who has been telling me all week that he'll be finished by tomorrow. Well, if he was still going to do - to a decent standard - everything he quoted me for, he would still be here next week, and I for one can't stand that thought so when he finally arrived tonight at 5.45, I walked round the bedrooms with him pointing out my concerns, told him to forget some aspects and get on with finishing to some sort of standard the most visible bits and likewise in the hallway tomorrow. I can't believe how much I've thrown at this bright idea of mine already, and I'm now resigned to having to get someone more capable in next week to do various bits and pieces before the new carpets go down. It has been, and still is, a fucking nightmare.
But it has shown me that I'm in a very lonely place and has been one of the most deeply unhappy experiences I can remember (and there have been more than my share, trust me!) Actually, I don't even know where to begin to put this in some sort of context for you, dear reader, but I realised today I have no faith to sustain me through such challenges, and that has been a devastating insight. I feel so alone and vulnerable to the way things are here socially and politically these days, and it really cuts deep that I don't know how to trust any sort of 'higher power' when I need it the most. I stopped drinking over 12 years ago and in that time have had the very worst most painful experiences of my life, and never once picked up a drink. How, I don't know exactly, but in no small part because I have such a tenuous stake in the world these days that a drink could unravel and destabilise what little 'security' I do have. But after this demoralising, disheartening and painfully lonely experience (which should've ended in a revitalising and affirming new look for the home I don't own but look after as well as if it was my own, at my expense) I'm kind of done. And please don't tell me this is first world stuff, you who might be tempted to trivialise what I'm describing. This is the latest in a long line of soul-destroying situations that I can't help but take personally, and it is seriously frightening me tonight that I see so clearly how little real support I have, or could ask for, despite the support I so often and so freely give others.
I don't even know what I'm expecting from posting this, but I'd ask you to be kind if you offer any response.