I feel your pain. Today was the first time in six years that I cleaned up one corner of the house and didn’t turn around to find that Celtling had created another hours worth of work for me somewhere else. It was amazing. I cleaned the kitchen floor and organized the pantry, and then I got to sit down and rest when I was done. No emergency! What a concept.
My house isn’t horrible; not super neat, but not squalid. It’s funny, though, that you could tell how old our kids were at any given time based on the level of mess.
When my son was born, it looked like a laundry and mail bomb had gone off. We even had dishes laying around in the kitchen, which had been unheard of before having kids. Having company over was very stressful and it took at least a solid day to day and a half of cleaning to get ready. The boy got a little older, I got more energy thanks to him actually sleeping and things got cleaner. Then his sister was born and things were messy again, but not as messy as they had been when my son was a baby. Since then, things have gotten progressively cleaner to the point where we’re a bit cluttered, but pretty sanitary.
Now it takes us some tidying, a good scrub in the kitchen and a wipedown in the bathroom with Clorox wipes to get ready for guests, which really isn’t bad.
This issue is the reason why my partner and I live next door to each other, rather than together. I have so many hobbies and interests, each producing its own clutter of piles of “stuff.” My partner is the opposite. His house is so spartan and immaculate. Each of our houses is 3-bedroom, and we joke that my clutter should be spread out to 20 houses, while his belongings would fit in one room. Back when we lived in NYC, we tried living together for 3 years, and we nearly broke up because of this issue.
With the exception of my partner, I do not invite people over. I need an electrician to do some work, but I will not call one until I at least get the kitchen and bathroom cleaned. We’ll see how long that takes.