I went over to my friend’s apartment yesterday and was stunned
as to how messy it was. Empty boxes, clothes everywhere, dvds scatttered, etc.
Just curious, why would a normal person live like this?
Now, I DO NOT want to turn this thread into a discussion of hoarding or people who live in absolute filth. This was a mess and clutter, not week old food containers sitting out or showers covered in roaches.
Also, he’s a normal guy who works about 40 hours a week managing a store. Not 100 hours a week in a high stress job.
Is this just the typical ‘guy’ apartment that I haven’t really been exposed to? I don’t expect a place to be immaculate when I stop over to pick up a friend to go hiking with in the morning. But, I would have gone nuts trying to live one day with that kind of mess around me.
I would probably qualify. The only real reason I can come up with is…
I hate housework more than I like a neat place and I don’t want to pay for maid service.
Also, while it seems a chaotic nightmare to some, you can probably name any possession I have and I’ll be able to take you to it (whether it’s neatly stacked away on a shelf or on a pile of unfolded undershirts on the dining room floor underneath the junk mail and the lawn chair.
Because we’re messy? I certainly don’t have any problems understanding why a lot of people like to live in perfectly clean houses. Hell, I’d rather live in a much cleaner house, but my lifestyle just doesn’t match.
It happens slowly. You make a mess looking for something or something and you have to run so you don’t pick it up. So next time something comes up, you figure you can just leave the clutter out since there is already so much clutter. After a few days it can become a real mess and you don’t want to deal with it all all.
Because it’s no more nor less useful than having a clean place. Why work hard to achieve something that has no practical purpose?
Now if I had regular visitors of the female persuasion that I sought to impress, I’d keep my place clean. But minus that, I don’t get anything out of it.
I’m untidy. I can walk past a pile of stuff that would make you twitch and simply, honestly, not even notice it. Mum calls it “Domestic blindness”. My house generally isn’t filthy, and it’s not as bad as it was when I was married, but it can be bad enough to embarrass me when people drop in unexpectedly.
I don’t like the place being messy, but my habit of absent-mindedly putting things down and walking away combined with my complete blindness to things I’m not specifically thinking about, my poor time management skills, and my innate laziness means that, more often than not, my house is untidy.
Plus, I’m easily distracted. When I do start cleaning up I’ll either start a second (third, fourth) task and forget about the original, or I’ll wind up on the internet frantically researching something that occurred to me while I was cleaning up that has absolutely nothing to do with anything but somehow jumped on my train of thought, or I’ll be hit with inspiration that LARGE PLASTIC BOXES will solve all my woes and rush out to buy them, come back six hours later with shoe polish and clothes pegs and call it a day.
Modified FlyLady helped me a little. I line up three chores. I spend 15 minutes on each, timing myself with a buzzer. When the buzzer sounds, I stop what I’m doing and move on to the next. The last 15 minutes of the hour I sit down and do whatever I’d like. Then repeat until everything is finished. Working in 15 minutes blocks, working against a time limit, and using a timer to manage my slack-off periods helps me stay focused on the tasks at hand and not get distracted. I may still be hit with random inspiration to look things up, but instead of rushing off to do it right away I know I won’t have more than 45 minutes before I can sit and do it with a clear conscience so I wait.
Meanwhile I’ve been sitting here doing this instead of folding my laundry and putting it away. Gotta go!
I’ve got two kids and it’s just too difficult to keep up. Sure I could keep up, but it’s too difficult for the amount of time and ambition I have. The wife and I try to keep it fairly clean but there is always a mess in one room or another. The kids get hungry so I make them something to eat. By the time dishes are done there is laundry to be done, by the time laundry is done there are toys to pick up, by the time the toys are picked up there are dishes to be done again. It’s getting better now because the kids are getting old enough to clean up their own toys but it’s still difficult. Not to mention the garage cleaning, the yard work, home and auto maintenance and two full time jobs. Sometimes you just want to come home and say “Screw the mess, I’m watching tv.” Then company comes by unnanounced and see’s my messy house and thinks “How can they live like this?” We clean up the clutter a couple of times a week but sometimes we don’t have the energy or ambition to do it. We both hate it though. It’s a big source of stress for both of us, but we can’t break the cycle.
There are many possibilities in my case. Maybe all 3 work together…maybe it’s none of the 3. I’ve given this some thought though, and this is what I’ve got.
I spent pretty much my whole childhood being terrorized because the “house is messy.” I’d clean the kitchen as soon as I got home from school, starting around 1st or 2nd grade, and my sister would clean the living room. As soon as my parents got home, they yelled at us for living in such a “fucking mess” and send us to our room. Then we’d emerge for dinner, eat, clean the kitchen, get yelled at again for having a dirty room, and back we’d go. When our parents REALLY blew up at us, which including smacking, hitting, and hair pulling, it was always because the house was a “fucking mess.” Honestly? I don’t know if it was or not. We lived in a tiny trailer, there was five of us, and we all had a lot of stuff. Maybe I was too stupid and lazy to load and unload a dishwasher, wipe down the counters, scrub the stove, and sweep the floor. All I know now is, I hate doing it. I hate doing it more than I’ve ever hated anything in my life. Cleaning is accompanied with such a feeling of hopelessness.
I seem to attract a mess no matter where I go or what I do. When I visit my best friend, all I do is sit on her couch with my laptop (she’s also my writing partner. the only reason I visit her is to sit in her living room and write with her). And yet…the immediate area around the couch instantly becomes the messiest place in the house! I don’t do it intentionally! From my POV, it seems like it’s perfectly fine and then BAM, embarrassingly messy, with no intermediate stages. I’d try to stay caught up on the mess if I noticed it. I mean, I’m really perplexed by this.
I don’t care that much. So what if there’s a pile of diet coke cans next to my couch? We don’t have flies or bugs buzzing around. So what if there are dirty dishes on the coffee table? When I run out of dishes, I’ll load the dishwasher. So what if my clothes are all over the floor? Who’s going to notice or care? The clean floor police? It’s so far down on my list of priorities that it’s difficult to even call it a priority. My husband and my sister care more than I do, and they’re good about staying on top of things.
But the OP would probably be amazed at how long I can ignore something. Putting away the DVD just isn’t an immediate concern, and it continues to not be an immediate concern. One day, I may realize “hey, that DVD has been next to the television for a month. how about that?” but again, I do not feel compelled to put it away, because the DVD is flat and not actually blocking my view of the television. Then eventually, one day the DVD and all of its friends (and the other clutter) finally does bother me a bit, so I clean and put away some, even most, of it.
And then the cycle starts again.
I have some theories as to why I’m like this - I’m working on those, too.
When our old house was on the market we got rid of 75% of everything that was in all the rooms. Packed it up and put it in storage. (This led to much hilarity and many trips to the storage place.) Kept the place really really clean for three weeks until we had a contract.
My husband LOVED living that way and wants to maintain it in the new house. I hated it. I feel like I’m living in a dentist’s waiting room.
It does not help that we have new furniture. It does not help that all the bookcases and all the boxes of books are still in the garage where, by the time it got cold, I had hoped we could actually store a car. I feel like I’m living in somebody else’s house. The garage with its piles of boxes feels good to me.
Please note that my house was not filthy, just messy and cluttered. My rules are that the beds are made, the bathrooms are clean, and the kitchen is fairly clean (i.e., every night dishes are all put away unless they are in the dishwasher, and I run the dishwasher almost every night). I spend about three hours straightening the night before the cleaning service comes every two weeks.
The weird thing is that I hate putting things away and don’t mind scrubbing, wiping, and vacuuming. So I put things away and pay somebody to scrub, wipe, and vacuum.
Because we’re too busy doing things that are more enjoyable and don’t want to put in the time to pick up?
I just got laundry from two or three weeks ago put away (I tend to leave it until I have no clean clothes). I let dishes pile up because I don’t want to empty the dishwasher (until I have no more small glasses for breakfast). Yes, I tend to dump things as I come in the door. My apartment looks pretty good right now, except for the pile of things to go the the thrift store and the one basket of towels and sheets and things to put away. The dishwasher needs emptying. I need to take out the recycling. I don’t want to do it.
My living room, dining room, and kitchen are messier than they have been in months past, for several reasons. One is that I’m working on some urgent and extremely time-critical projects at work, and they just can’t wait. Another is that I had to finish repatching and resealing as much of my driveway as I could while the weather was still warm and dry. There were several other time-critical tasks that absolutely had to get done.
At times like these, housekeeping can wait. Not for too much longer, though. I’ll be tidying up the place after the boss leaves for his business trip.
Worst case scenario for me is if in the middle of a cleanup job, I run across a book or a magazine. I can’t continue cleaning until I’ve read a few/dozen/hundred pages.
There are other things I would much rather be doing than making sure I have a nice looking house. It’s a bit better now that I have a child. Now I clean to make sure he’s not rolling around in my husband’s clothes or crawling over to something small and colorful that he will immediately put in his mouth.
It’s a matter of priorities. Having good looking house: low priority.
Keeping son safe: High priority. Hence, my house is almost always clean now.
To me, there is also a difference between ‘messy’ and ‘dirty’. Clothes and books on the floor, phone book and baby wipes on the coffee table, dvds cluttered around the TV is ‘messy’. Roaches, old food, animal feces, dishes never done, toilets and showers covered in mildew is ‘dirty’. I think anyone would agree that ‘dirty’ is always miserable, however, reactions to ‘messy’ seem to vary widely. It ranges from “OMG! So stressed out by this clutter” to “Clutter? What clutter”?
I cleaned my desk at work last week. I can’t find shit now. It takes forever to figure out what file it’s in. When it’s just in piles and stacks, it’s really easy; I just look for the pile of the project, and then recognize the thickness and/or unique markings of the stack. Much better than that file nonsense.
i have found that i am the type of person who likes things within reach. if i have to open a drawer or box to get to something, it will rarely find its way back into the drawer or box.
about once or twice a month i’ll get tired of tripping over things and do a clear up. it slowly goes back to mess up. lather, rinse, repeat.
Well part of it is hoarding but I know you don’t want to talk about that. But having more stuff than you have places for in general can be a factor. Probably for me the biggest factor is procrastination. Sometimes you put off putting something away til later, and when later comes you are too tired to bother. That adds up pretty quickly. And once the mess gets to a certain point, you put off any cleaning at all until you have time to clean everything all at once, rather than just cleaning as much as you happen to have time for.
I know people who do not mind living in clutter, or at least they do not seem to mind it. I have a neighbor a very nice lady who literally has so much junk you have to walk in a path to get to her sofa, that has junk on it so only one person can sit, then her lazy boy that she uses. She does keep up her outside.
What I can’t understand is people who buy beautiful expensive homes then turn them into a slum place. There is one house in my area that I would have loved to buy if I had won the lottery;Now it is so tumbled down you couldn’t give it to me. Another one is about the same, one day I was pulling weeds from our garden fence and the lady of the housewas looking for her dog,then she said to me I hate people who pulll the grass from their fences,well, her property is not worth what they paid for it and ours has increased in value. I can’t understand why they buy an expensive house and wreck it why not buy a slum house to begin with?