Disclaimer: Harry Potter does not belong to me.
He wishes that he felt comfortable just pitching everything in the house that did not look like it might have been important to Sirius. He doesn't. He has had the unfortunate experience of dealing with the aftermath of throwing out something without realizing that it was important to the larger scheme of things. So, his impulse to just mass trash all of the items that aren't in his godfather's bedroom and getting on with it has to be suppressed because he just does not know. He does not know which items are actual trash – which are flotsam and jetsam that could be tossed and which are dangerous items that need to be dealt with before tossing it where it might be got at by an unsuspecting population. He is starting to believe that he is never going to be finished – Kreacher is good with the cleaning but there is only so much that he can tell him about what is what. The things that predate his service in the house are often as much of a mystery to him as they are to Harry and there just appear to be no shortcuts out of this mess.
He supposes that he could just seal off some rooms and tackle them one at a time, but the truth is that he wants to have an actual home. The Weasleys are always happy to have him, but he wants a space that is his that he can make into something that he can see himself raising children in someday. He does not want to hear about how he is too young for those sorts of plans – he did not plan on having a future at all not so very long ago. He wants a home. What he has right now is a space that might as well be considered a giant trap waiting to be sprung. It isn't that he can't live in it – it's just that he isn't so sure that he could let anyone else live in it. He sure isn't comfortable bringing Teddy over. He takes him over to Molly's and Arthur's or out to parks.
Andromeda has come to the house a couple of times without her grandson in tow (something about closure), but it was never her home. She has assured him that if Kreacher doesn't know about a particular item then she won't either. So, he stares at the key that is currently gracing his palm and wonders how to even go about trying to figure out what it might open. It looks decidedly out of place by virtue of not having any decoration. He is used to the majority of the things in the house being overly ornate. This is simply plain and he hates that he is having to sit here and ponder what all might be wrong with it rather than pitching it in the bin and moving on to the next item. If he keeps putting things in the pile of things to figure out what they are later, then he is never going to make a dent in this.
The little circle that he can feel pressing against his leg from the interior of his pocket is supposed to be his motivation to keep at it even when he feels as though he is out and out drowning in this mess, but really, he just has not wanted to put it away ever since he picked it up at the shop. He wants to keep it close to him (something that he will never admit to absolutely anyone because there is no way that he is going to deal with the ribbing – good natured as it would be – that would come from every guy he knows if he ever admitted something that sappy out loud). The ring is just a symbol. He knows this, but it is a symbol that he treasures. He does not have any reason to believe that she will not say yes. Still, as long as the ring is in his pocket and not on her finger, he does not know for sure that this is really happening to him. He wants everything that it represents, but, mostly, he just wants to know that he has a rest of his life to spend with Ginny.
He doesn't want to wait. He knows that Mrs. Weasley understands even when she clucks her tongue at him and reminds him that he has time. He knows she understands that even with the breathing room that he never dared to dream that he was going to receive that there are no guarantees.
He wants to get married. He wants stability. He wants that little circle in his pocket to stop living in his pocket. He knows he doesn't really have to finish this house before he can move on – he could afford a little house in the country somewhere where they won't have to worry about prying eyes if they want to play a pick up game of Quidditch in the backyard (and that is not childish – it's Quidditch). There's a place he has even looked at a couple of times and the truth is that he would much rather live there than in the former House of Black. He still wants to do this. He wants their townhouse to be ready and available for when it just makes more sense to stay there (and how weird is that to think about when he knows very well that the Floo network makes everything central). He grew up Muggle and it still shows in a lot of ways. He just wants to do this – it does not matter what all the reasons he gives to justify it to himself may be.
He needs all the darkness and damage of this house to be remade into something livable – something pleasant, something with a future. He does not want to explain – does not have to explain to anyone why he might be focusing on things like that after all the things that he has been through. (He most definitely does not want to do any further talking about that. He had been all talked out about that before the talking had even gotten underway).
Maybe he's a little damaged. Maybe they all are, but it's not like it is going to keep him from moving forward. There are just some things that he wants to prove to himself that can be done – symbolic gestures though they may be. Not to sound all big headed about it but he is the savior of the wizarding world. If it is important to him to tackle house cleaning projects of gargantuan size, then can't people just leave him alone about it?
Why does the world at large always want to ask him so many questions?
It is almost enough to make him want to go lose himself in the Muggle world for a while. He was always an invisible nobody there and he would not be opposed to revisiting that state of being now and again if he thought he could get away with it. It is tempting, but it is not tempting enough to give up the people that he would be giving up in the process. People are more important than the convenience of invisibility.
He had once dared to hold a little hope that after Dudley went away to school that there might be enough leeway among his peers for him to carve out a niche in the day school that was to have been his lot. There were few things that he had bothered to hold onto hoping for in those days but that one had persisted as an occasionally touched upon thought in the back of his brain. He, of course, had never made it that far. He had gone to Hogwarts instead and somehow managed to be blessed with friends that had been willing to bleed and die for him. He doubts he missed out on much by giving up his once upon a time dreams of a Dudley free local school. He could not have conceived of the depth of the friendships that he would become a part of – not least of which was because he had been too young back in those days to truly understand just what that meant.
He had a lot of bad luck in the course of his life, but he was very confidant in his good luck in friends making up for whatever the rest of it might have entailed.
Anyway, none of that thinking is helping him to dig his way out from under the pile in front of him. If he did not know any better, then he would swear that the house itself is adding to the stacks when he is not looking (although, in truth, he does not know any better – it might actually be happening). He needs to get back on his self-appointed task. He has a key to figure out where and to what it might belong and sitting around daydreaming about the ring in his pocket is not going to do anything about it.