Well, that’s actually good. The way I see it, 4 is the result of chronic messiness, while 2 is just an acute case. When you find 2 occurring, that’s when you gotta blow the whistle and make people put up their shit so that it goes to semi-3. (Damn, why did I order these images so randomly?)
I’m not an expert in this, so take with a grain of salt, but it might be a good idea to have your kids start keeping the upstairs tidy too (and you guys should unpack your boxes). For the same reason that making the bed first thing in the morning helps prevent sloppy behaviors, the habit of keeping things organized in one part of the house can translate to order elsewhere. As an example, at my old place, I used the guest room for sewing and other artsy stuff. After a while it got obnoxiously messy because I got lazy. I started avoiding using it. And so then of course I started doing my projects in the living room. The clutter came with them.
I guess what I’m saying is that to get the relief you really want, the key is to create good habits. That means changing the way your family members treat all of the space they occupy, not just certain parts.
Aww, man. We’re 4-ish, and it’s exactly like you said - it’s all stuff that accumulates and requires thought and effort to fix even though it’s not actually that much stuff.
My grandmother would sometimes wash the “spare” dishes, you know, the ones that don’t get used that much. Just because they might get a little dusty or whatever sitting there.
How do you get there? Seriously, how do you get to “cleaning the extra dishes” clean? I don’t even understand what the steps are from where I am.
I learned the answer to this question a long time ago. Keeping your house clean has a lot to do with how much time you spend in it. A single person who doesn’t work and spends all day at home can easily mess up a lot of surfaces but not really spend any time cleaning them up. On the other hand person who works constantly and is never home does not have as much of an opportunity to make a mess. Their place is probably going to stay a lot cleaner.
I’ve pretty much given up. “Cleaning up as you go” or even “having a clean-up session at the end of the day” sounds so simple, but I generally leave the house before 6:30 and generally return after 7:30 and work at least 3/4 Saturdays, and I have a four year old. Whatever energy I have at the end of the day/on Sunday I want to spend with my kid, and, frankly, it’s not much. Sunday I do laundry. Christmas break is coming up and I’d very much like to spend the time cleaning up and getting rid of stuff, but I am not entirely sure I won’t just collapse into a pile for 2 weeks. And I still have plenty of work to do in that interval, too.
1 is my mother’s house.
2 is my sewing room.
3 is my living room, but add a pile of magazines on an end table.
4 is similar to 2 but with small children, so is understandable.
I’m not as good at keeping the bathrooms clean as I should be, but the kitchen is usually pretty clean.
Our house is comfy and a little cluttered, but it makes is seem livable and friendly. I do wish my husband would deal with his paper-piling and clothes hoarding issues.
2 and 4 don’t seem that far apart to me, obviously with 4 being what happens to a 2 if left unchecked for a week. Both rooms seem like you could take care of a lot of the issue by chucking a lot of toys/recreational items into a basket. Weirdly, both rooms look clean (untidy, but clean) to me (from a picture, on the internet), which makes me wonder if maybe some additional stuff was strewn around for effect. In real life, it’s hard for me to separate cleaning from tidying, because with so much stuff hanging around, it’s more work to sweep, vacuum and dust. (For example, if the mess in 4 is genuine, if you moved those boxes, there would be tons of dust bunnies behind them, and the rug would be gritty with toddler snack crumbs).
I grew up in a tidy home where both parents had a similar style of keeping thing neat and cleaning up as you go. It wasn’t obsessive surface cleaning or neat-freakishness (compared to others I knew). Now, of course, the kids rooms were the usual mess, but the rest of the house was kept up. So, either through genetics or upbringing, I inherited that style.
Now, my spouse did not come from the same kind of environment. Consequently, our styles in this regard are different. I usually keep things tidy, but I also know not to touch that stack of paper that my spouse put on the corner of the table 2 years ago and hasn’t picked up. Does it drive me crazy? Well, let’s just say it is one of the straws on this camels back. I’ve gotten past the sense that their style represents passive-aggressive behavior - like me, through genetics or upbringing, they inherited this style (the parents home is a mess).
I have read, and agree, that for someone like me clutter causes a higher level of stress. It’s like a low hum that is constantly in the background.
I would recommend that our government look into this as an enhanced interrogation technique to replace waterboarding.
In my experience, there are really 4 categories, with the extremes tending toward some sort of mental problem.
There’s super-messy and unclean- nearly hoarder level. Like leaving pizza boxes out, heap of days old dirty dishes, once-quarterly mopping/sweeping/vacuuming, etc… It takes a certain willful intent NOT to clean up periodically to achieve this state. Avoiding cleaning is pretty much the first priority here.
Then there’s messy, but periodically gets cleaned, and is generally sanitary and not a rat and roach resort. This is a broad category- anything from bachelor pads to houses with little kids that would otherwise be much cleaner. Picking up and cleaning isn’t a particularly high priority in these houses.
The broad clean category is the one where the houses are mostly clean- but do get messy from time to time. Picking up and cleaning is a priority, although maybe not the first priority. Houses that are cleaned diligently every week fall into this category, IMO.
The neat-freak mental health problem houses are the ones where there’s no tolerance for any mess or uncleanliness at all, and the inhabitants get really agitated when it happens. The ones where the place gets swept at least once a day, and probably more than that, and may get mopped/vacuumed more than weekly. These houses are more like museums or show-houses than actual lived-in homes. My MIL’s house reminds me of this- when we go visit with our boys (4 and 1.5 yrs old), she’s constantly gasping and puttering around sweeping up and cleaning, because she’s a bit crazy. Cleaning in these homes is the FIRST priority- they’re the people who may get home from a party at 1 am, pay the babysitter, and then spend time cleaning up rather than going to bed.
Most people fall into the middle two categories, with at least in my experience, a sort of concentration toward the middle of each category- most people’s houses fall into a sort of “generally clean” or “generally messy” category, without being obsessively clean or vaguely disgusting.
For me it’s more like visual static that is lightly but constantly stimulating my peripheral senses, firing off neurons. It takes effort to tune it out, and over time that effort wears me out. Then little things have the ability to stress me out because my energy reserves are depleted by the junk distracting me. Disordered clutter drains me the same way that talkative people do. Perhaps this is a manifestation of some flavor of introversion.
This is interesting observation that clicks with me. I will be okay for a bit with the piles of paper and the untidiness of horizontal surfaces, but occasionally it will get to me and I go on a round of clearing this stuff away. It’s like I don’t see it for weeks and then suddenly I’m all “This place is a mess! I gotta get it under control!” even though the mess isn’t any bigger or messier.
I had a roommate like this once. They could go for weeks just tossing plates and trash wherever. Then all of a sudden it was OMG CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN! Kinda odd, if you ask me.
