I’d like to interrupt this thread about motivation to insert a link to a site about DE-motivation:
http://www.despair.com
Mockeries of those ‘motivational posters’ you see in office buildings. Funny as hell.
I think we are in very much the same place… it all sounds too familiar and all these hints will help me as well. techchick, feel free to email me if you need moral support or just to vent! cleaning sucks! but living clean is a good place to be for me as well
-------------------------I am a redhead, you see, and I do not tempt. I insist. -Cristi
I kept remembering this thread, and I am pleased to announce that I can see the top of my table and actually sit down to eat! Techchick, how are you doing? I still have a long way to go, as the boyfriends decision to move out has thrown things into disarray, but I am marking this thread to return. More advice, and some success stories would be good - 'cause next I have to get back to the gym (eeek!)
Slob here.
zyada’s advice came closest to the kind I might follow. The rest of you tired me out just reading the procedures. Thanks for the guilt, though. That usually motivates me.
For those of you interested in the various chemicals available for use in household cleaning, I submit a rundown of their pros and cons:
- Alcohol: Cleaning solvent of choice among many, but be careful. Moderate use may dull the pain of cleaning, but too much leads to sloppiness, spills, and breakage. Extreme overuse creates much worse mess than you started with.
- Barbiturates and Benzodiazepines: Similar to alcohol, Mother’s Little Helper doesn’t really help clean, but is good for hiding dirt. Also good for hiding from other forms of unpleasantness, such as Life.
- Cocaine: Expensive, but probably the best alkaline available for household needs. Energizing and euphoric, it truly makes cleaning fun. High efficiency despite frequent breaks.
- Heroin: Not recommended. Causes lethargy and damaged spoons.
- LSD: Highly unpredictable, cleaning-wise. You may end up with spotless house, yard, and neighborhood. Or you may decide to “become one with the dirt.”
- Marijuana: Popular organic cleanser. May result in obsessive cleaning of one tiny area. Usually good for cleaning out refrigerator.
- Methamphetamine: Similar to cocaine, but a harsher chemical. Good for 3-4 day cleaning jobs. May result in abraded areas (overscrubbed floors, clawed skin).
- Nitrous Oxide: Good for seeing the humor in having a messy house.
- PCP: Not recommended. May clean houses of strangers, uninvited.
- X: Like mixing LSD with methamphetamine. Making the bed may lead to making love to the bed.
Not as deep as most other responses, but I noticed you mentioned dog and cat hair.
Get yourself a swiffer (if you’re worried about the floor) and a big honkin’ package of refill cloths. You can use the cloths by themselves to dust everything and the cloths on the Swiffer unit to clean your vinyl and hardwood flooring! It gets right up along the baseboards and grabs the little fuzzies like you wouldn’t believe.
Boy techchick, I really needed this thread; I can’t imagine how I missed. Some of the advice wore me out to chew through. I think I’ll just go with the simple MrKnowItAll plan right NOW!
Good luck!
I can empathize, techchick, 'cause I was once in the same boat as you- depressed, didn’t give a shit about anything, literally couldn’t see the floor. My mom got me to clean my apartment by threatening to call the board of health on me. It was that bad. I’m still not much of a house keeper. I come home from work and fall apart, then when the mess starts to bother me, I go on a cleaning binge, then let the place go for a couple of weeks again. I’m getting progressively better at keeping the place clean, mostly because my mom is now my roommate and she nags me constantly.
My advice (and it really works) Decide to spend a set amount of time every day, say fifteen minutes to a half hour, cleaning. You’ll be surprised. Once you get started and get a small area clean, you tend to keep going until, surprise, the whole room is clean. Don’t try to force it beyond a half hour if you’re miserable and don’t feel up to it, but if you get to the end of the half hour and you feel like keeping going, go for it.
I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - Arthur Dent
Yes! All of the trash (7 bags) is bagged and gone! History by the curbside.
If you’ve got a lot of laundry accumulated there is a method to getting it done quicker. Wash the lightest stuff first (underwear, etc.) This takes the shortest to dry and you have less time waiting for the dryer to finish when the 2nd load is done in the washer. Keep going washing in a lightest-to-heaviest fashion. (Load two would be stuff like shirts and sheets, then jeans and sweatshirts, last load would be towels, robes and area rugs, etc.) That way the stuff that takes the longest to dry can take all day to do it because everything else is washed. (Hope I explained this so it makes sense.) As for putting it away, get a really relaxed attitude about your clothing storage. My socks go into a drawer loose, no rolling or folding. Ditto for underwear (Hubby’s boxers are folded in half.) I find it easiest to put as much as I can on hangers so that I’m left with very little to fold. In one apartment we lived in, the closet was excruciatingly small, and hubby didn’t like his shirts on hangers anyway, so I put up a set of expanding hooks and all his clean shirts were merely tossed onto that. What a timesaver!
I grew up in a really messy house and it took a lot for me to become even remotely tidy, but I found that it helped me to get really ruthless with the clutter. A lot of what makes a place messy isn’t actual dirt, it’s just having too much stuff. Pretend you’re moving while you clean. In addition to the trash bags mentioned earlier, add a box to go to Goodwill. As you’re moving something from one room to the other ask yourself if you’d bother keeping it if you knew you’d have to pack it up in a move and find a place for it when you got there. If it’s something you’re just moving from room to room because you don’t really have a place for it and you don’t really use it often, get rid of it! If you’re tired of repeatedly dusting something, get rid of that too! If you can’t put away anything in your linen closet because you have 20 sets of sheets taking up all the room, get rid of some. (You need one set for each bed, and an emergency spare set of each bed size. Think about it.) If you hate the way all your dishes pile up, get rid of some! You’ll have to do the dishes more often because you’ll run out. If you’re really attached to your junk and don’t think you can live without it, pack it up in a box and date it. If 6 months from now you haven’t gone back and used something, missed anything, or can’t even remember what you put in it, by all means get it out of your way. (This is a trick I use. Stuff I’m considering getting rid of I put in a wardrobe in our dining room. When one of the local charities drops off one of their bags, I’m already detached from the stuff so it’s no trouble to plunk it out by the curb. If you earmark something to be gotten rid of, but know you have some time to reconsider, that really really helps conquer some of the seperation anxiety.)
Mostly, like the others have said, take one thing at a time, concentrate on getting stuff clean before you bother with getting organized, but I also suggest that if you streamline you’ll have far less organization and future cleaning to worry about.
Good luck!
Marge: “You know, Homer, it’s very easy to criticize.”
Homer: “Fun, too!”
The car is washed and laundry’s been dropped off at the cleaners.
Awright! For the first time in a couple of months all of the dishes are washed and put away and the counters are wiped down. I don’t have a dishwasher and I’ve been in a bit of a funk. So, while I hope this thread does techchick some good, I’m using it to my own reward. I’ll screw with the bills the rest of the night, but I think the week holds out promise of a haircut and some mop time.
I know y’all are holdin’ your breath.
So, techchick, you’re single?
What, there was a question?