Happy New Year, everyone! 🎆And welcome @Phrenologistsfinger, @Defender90 and @GonnaGetGoingReturns!
I have caught up with every single post here since my last post, i.e., October 9th, and I would like to express my deepest sympathies to everyone who has gone through incredibly difficult times over the last three months of 2022 
I am immensely impressed with your strength, and sending caring thoughts your way ❤️ Please be kind to yourself, and do not beat yourselves up if something does not go as planned. Sometimes we need to slow down, and give ourselves time to breathe, and adapt to a new reality. And when you feel ready to proceed, approach the tasks very gently, one step at a time.
As for me, I’ve had zero progress since October, and here is why:
In the middle of October, I had an unexpected visitor – a man who claimed to be a loft specialist sent by my housing association/landlord (he gave the correct name). There has been an issue with the loft and the roof for almost a decade now (my tenancy agreement doesn't allow me to fix it privately, and the HA/landlord ignores me), so it sounded legit, and I let him in. He inspected the loft, said that the insulation does not adhere to the modern standards, and said that he will need to put new insulation on top of the existing one but to do so he would need me to empty the loft first. To which I, of course, agreed.
The loft was full to the brim with my stuff so when it was all dragged down into the flat (over the course of two weekends), it covered every empty surface in my flat (as you can imagine) except for the kitchen and bathroom – those spaces, which I had fully decluttered and religiously kept clean over the last year, MUST stay free of clutter at all costs 🙌
This made it incredibly hard to find space to deal with the rest of my hoard, and I felt claustrophobic, trapped and completely overwhelmed with the size of my hoard. It made deep cleaning impossible too, as I could not reach the outer perimeter, windows and the ceiling of my rooms anymore.
Meanwhile, the insulation specialist never returned. I called him, I texted him, I left voice messages, but to no avail. In December I called the housing association to ask about what’s going on, and they said that they never sent anyone, and they have no clue who that man was.
Unfortunately, this changed nothing as emptying the loft had revealed the magnitude of the issues: the roof constantly drips water onto the beams, forming puddles which sit on the top of the insulation, creating brown spots on the ceiling in every room of the flat, and making the light bulb in the living room flicker every 10 seconds when the lights are off 😱 I really don’t want to put my items back in there until the roof is repaired and the loft is re-insulated and boarded to prevent the insulation from being squashed by the weight of my items.
Therefore, for the foreseeable future, the stuff which I have taken down from the loft will stay inside my flat making my life even more miserable than it currently is. If it becomes absolutely unbearable, I will have to consider the external storage options or… I will have to get the grip, and chuck most of it (which is my worst nightmare) 😖