Sure you have to pay rent and bills, and all the chores are down to you and you only.

But one of the best things about having your own home as an adult, is the ability to decorate however you want, eat what you want when you want, and fill the house with things that you love.

For the couple in this story, however, many of the decisions have already been made for them.

And after an altercation with her mother-in-law, this woman has discovered how truly difficult it will be to actually make their home their own.

Read on to find out what happened.

AITA for wanting to get rid of a play kitchen in our living room when we have no kids?

My fiancée (24, female) and I (26, female) live in her childhood home.

I’ve lived here for about two and a half years, both of us pay rent, and since before my first day we’ve been slowly but surely cleaning up the house to make it livable and comfortable.

My fiancée has a niece (five, turning six this year) but she hardly visits as much as she used to since they moved to the other side of the city, which is a good half hour an hour to an hour’s drive away.

My mother-in-law (50, female) lives in the south and makes her journey up north maybe two or three times a year for events, holidays, birthdays, etc., and every single time she has her granddaughter over for a sleepover to spend some time with her.

Fair enough, we love to see her too.

Let’s see how this situation has got tricky for the couple.

Now here’s where the problem arises.

Sadly my fiancée’s dad passed away when she was around seventeen, and his things are still in the house, and the house is split between his three children since he had no real inheritance.

His possessions include things he bought anywhere between fifteen or twenty years ago, if even older.

One of those things is a play kitchen that my brother-in-law (fifteen, male) played with when he was little, which was then gifted to his niece.

However, the play kitchen is currently sitting in our living room, taking up space and being a general eyesore since my fiancée and I don’t have kids, and don’t plan on having them any time soon.

Read on to find out how this well-intentioned woman inadvertently upset her in-laws.

I reached out to my niece’s parents and my younger brother-in-law, since he was the previous owner before our niece.

All of them gave the okay, and my brother-in-law (who lives with my mother-in-law) asked her as well.

But apparently my mother-in-law got upset that I didn’t ask her directly, and called it “disrespectful” since it is “her house” and everything should go through her.

She also mentioned the kid wouldn’t have anything to play with when she’s over.

But there was more to the situation than initially met the eye.

I should mention that she is sentimental. And I completely understand sentimentality – there was a time when I felt bad throwing away cards to the point where I had a whole collection of them in my closet for years.

But we’re talking about a plastic pretend kitchen, for children, where the “microwave” sounds like a distorted bird’s song.

It’s stained slightly yellow from cigarettes (that she smoked in the house) and it’s just collecting dust.

And it’s not as though there aren’t things for the kid to do here – she has coloring books, the great outdoors, a nearby playground, a tricycle, chalk, TV shows, and no lack of toys from her own home she could bring over.

All this has left the woman with quite the dilemma.

I don’t know, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that a fifty-year-old woman is getting so uppity about a toy that isn’t even hers.

It’s a toy that her late husband bought over twelve years ago, that wasn’t even new when it was purchased, according to my fiancée.

So AITA?

It’s clear that there are some issues with boundaries here.

If her mother-in-law is renting the family home to her daughter and her fiancée, there needs to be clear-cut lines about what can and can’t be done with the property, and in an ideal world, all personal and family possessions will be moved away.

Here’s the problem when family is involved though: implied and sentimental boundaries can be crossed without the person even knowing they’re there until it’s too late.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit had to say about this.

This person found the perfect solution for keeping her mother-in-law happy.

While others explained that, in a legal context, she might be in the wrong.

Meanwhile, this Redditor encouraged the couple to relocate to a home of their own, where they could have full autonomy.

Sure it can be inconvenient, but when someone has passed away it’s normal for the people around them to be sentimental.

But living around relics of the past is no way for this young couple to make their home.

It’s important that they have their own space, one that they can truly make their own.

They need to get out.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.