This thread got me to thinking about house messiness, and what levels of clutter/mess/dirt people will tolerate. So, a poll!
What level of neatness is your house on a typical day? Choose all that apply.
Missed the edit window, and forgot to add the thread that inspired this. That would be this one.
At any average time, not really fit to accept visitors. I could get it to acceptable in an hour or two, but I really need to spend an entire weekend sometime to get it truly clean.
I have some relatives in town this weekend, and wasn’t expecting to see them until Sunday. I was planning on cleaning tomorrow just in case we ended up at my place. I really don’t want my niece (who is 26, but in my mind she’s still 5) seeing my place the way it is right now.
Plans changed – we’re getting together tonight. I made sure to suggest a restaurant far on the other side of town to minimize the chance of a “Let’s see your place.”
When I saw that thread about jobs that take you into other people’s houses, I thought it was going to be along the lines of “are other people wary of letting you in, do they trust you” etc. I was surprised to read that many people are living in such horrible conditions. Aside from a protective coating of animal hair and dust, we don’t have much to worry about.
ETA: Of course, we have [del]slaves[/del] children of a helpful age. 
I just went through a heavy cleaning of my house, which was a disaster area. Now the first floor is something I actually wouldn’t mind showing to a stranger, although my bedroom is still something of a mess. I’ve been working hard the past month to shed the packrat mentality and just start throwing junk away, as well as keeping the place from degenerating into a mess again.
At any time, I could have visitors over and the state of my main floor is perfectly presentable. There might be a dish or two out from breakfast or lunch if I haven’t got around to clearing those yet, or a little toy clutter on the floor, but otherwise, the place is pretty decent.
Upstairs (bedrooms and laundry room) is a different story. The kids’ rooms are a range from mostly OK to total disaster area, and my own bedroom is very cluttered and messy. Part of it is that I just devote most of my energy to keeping the main living areas clean and tidy, and part of it is that MrWhatsit is an extremely cluttery/messy person and tends to just throw things all over the place. I can’t blame him entirely, though. I will say that these days he does confine his mess primarily to his downstairs office area, and our bedroom, which is a huge improvement over the way things used to be, years ago.
Worn clothes tend to end up in piles on the floor. There are some small piles of junk mail here and there. We have 2 cats so there’s always a layer of cat hair on everything that no amount of cleaning can remove or prevent.
Dirty dishes or food lying about I do not tolerate. Overall not bad. Can be made presentable within an hour.
Having a cleaning lady forces me to tidy up every other week before she visits. With just me and my husband the house doesn’t get too bad between visits, although if we’ve had several cooking projects the kitchen floor gets a bit dirtier than I’d like.
The front rooms of my house are guest-presentable, if a bit cluttered with books and art projects, almost all the time.
While my house isn’t spotless, it’s not dirty either. The beds are made daily, the floors swept twice a day, mopped every other day, dishes done 1 to 3 times a day, and laundry done as needed.
You’ll find books and toys left laying wherever someone got done with them, and dusting might happen twice a month.
I do have roaches, despite spending $800 this year on traps, sprays, and exterminators. It helps some, but doesn’t seem to get rid of them completely. One exterminator said I wouldn’t since there’s some woods and a large kudzu field behind my house.
2 adults, 2 7y.o. girls in a small apartment. The floors get neglected. Dirty clothes, food (except for occaisonal stray cheerios and macaroni noodles), dirty dishes aren’t a problem. The cat takes care of the mice. It’s the hundreds of little toys, stuffed animals, doll clothes, beads, pencils, markers, crayons, strings, ribbons, and art projects that we’re getting buried in. Every once in a while we make a sweep, but it just piles up again. Of course I’d rather have out of control art projects than no art projects but it would be nice to find some middle ground!
I clean every day. I make my bed every day. I clean up whatever mess I make every night–clothes go into the hamper, shoes get put away, books put back where they belong. The kitchen and bathroom get cleaned very regularly–e.g., every time I cook, I clean up after myself. If I make toast, I wipe up the crumbs. If I cook supper, I wash everything afterwards and clean up. The sink and vanity in the bathroom get wiped down every day. The toilet and shower get cleaned every week. The floors get swept every day and Swiffered every other. It’s just the way I am. It’s not some extreme hassle or anything, it’s just part of my routine.
Consequently, I don’t do a major cleaning every so often. No need to unless I feel like hauling out the big guns and doing the oven or scouring out the sink or whatever.
My house is typically 10-15 minutes away from being “friend ready” That is, if someone calls and asks if they can stop over and watch a movie/hangout/have dinner, I need about 10 minutes to get it picked up (I have a 4 year old and two dogs so it’s mostly just toys). About 20 minutes beyond that and I can get kitchen counters and the bathroom cleaned, about 20 minutes beyond that if I want to vacuum and to really do a good once over on the entire main floor maybe a total of 2-3 hours which would include dusting, cleaning ceiling fans, straightening out my bedroom, daughters bedroom, spare bedroom and doing the bathroom and kitchen floors.
I usually say my house might be messy, but it just needs to be picked up, not scrubbed from top to bottom. There isn’t mold on the window sills, no half eaten pizza on the kitchen table, you won’t find dirty dishes pushed under the bed, the groceries are always put away, the fridge isn’t full of things that have been in there for years. There’s just a lot of clutter scattered around.
What he said. I’m usually about an hour away from visitor-ready. A weekend away from mom-ready.
My house is never mom-ready. I was raised in a house where you literally could eat from the floors. There was never anything out of place, everything was constantly cleaned and disinfected, etc. Now that I’m an adult, my mom has seen my house in conditions ranging from borderline-hoarder, to totally immaculate and pristine, and not once has she ever complimented me on my household. Not even to say, “Hey, I notice that you guys straightened up in here and don’t qualify to be on some kind of intervention-style reality show anymore!” I would like to say that I’m mature enough that this realization has meant I don’t even try to make my house mom-ready anymore, but no, I totally still do. I just mopped my kitchen floor today because she’s coming over tomorrow briefly. Will she say anything about it? No. Will it change her opinion of me as being a slobbish person that she is embarrassed to say was raised in her household? No. But the mop comes out anyway. Sigh.
Sorry, I seem to have barfed my personal issues all over someone else’s thread. I’ll come by and pick that up later, I promise.
It’s cluttered but clean. Smells nice. Nothing unexpectedly sticky. I’m a “multiple fruit bowls on the worktop, hang your pans on the wall, creeping library blight, look at this whatsit I bought in a junk shop” friendly sort of householder. My socks might be hanging on the Aga rack for a second night, but that’s an accepted part of the Aga rack look.
I’m awesome at untidy, but I don’t think we qualify as dirty.
Now that I live alone in my very own condo, I’ve turned into Mr. Clean. I make my bed as soon as I get out of it; I don’t crash on the sofa and I don’t eat anything in the living room. Cookware gets cleaned as soon as it is cool enough to hit with water and dishes are washed (by me) as soon as I’m finished eating from them. I will admit to being lax about dusting but I’m becoming obsessive about the other stuff. Cleaning is a something I’m beginning to really like; it keeps me off the street and out of the pool halls.
Now that some folks have moved out of my house, it’s not such a big deal to keep the place neat. Everyone here is old enough to pick up after themselves and do so. I don’t have a lot of frou-frou stuff or nicknacks in the living areas and that helps.
Everyone’s bedroom is different. My son keeps his spartan. The girls are a lot more lax about it. They are the opposite with their bathrooms, go figure. Our master bedroom is clean but MAN we have a lot of stuff. I use the pile method and boy are there a lot of piles!
My office is kind of similar but the piles of paperwork, files, etc. move around a whole lot more.
I hate a messy kitchen and really don’t like to go to bed with one. I will rinse & stack dishes though, I don’t insist on having them clean before bedtime.
I did mark “dust” because this place is lousy with dust. We have a 500-foot-long gravel driveway and dust getting into the house is a given. It’s just hard to keep up with it.
All in all, I’m not afraid for anyone to drop by at a moment’s notice, but it will look like people live here.
It’s tidy enough that today someone turned up early to view the place as a prospective home-swap (I’m a social housing tenant and there’s a scheme whereby tenants can move areas by swapping their homes), and I wasn’t worried about letting him in.
It’s still not pristine, mainly because the flooring, except in the kitchen, is impossible to keep clean no matter what you do - if I don’t move out, I’m getting new flooring. Flooring is something you don’t think of most of the time, but it makes such a difference to the overall impression.
Until my GF moved out, the place was very messy. I’ve pretty much overhauled the entire flat since then. This prior messiness was not just due to my GF’s stuff or my GF being messy, but a mental stagnation of sorts that expressed itself in the state of our home.
I own two dogs, and I work 60-70 hours a week. You could film a post-nuclear holocaust movie in my apartment.