I believe you. Please don’t tell anyone. 
[Rita Rudner]Men don’t live well alone, they’re like bears with furniture[/RR]
Actually my place isn’t too bad. I run round with the Dyson every couple of weeks, the kitchen and bathroom get cleaned often enough. Downstairs is pretty tidy because loads of stuff got moved upstairs when I had new carpets laid. This of course means that bedroom 2 has hundreds of LPs stacked round the walls and CDs filling the window sills, bedroom 3 has three (3) dead PCs and their monitors (keyboards etc.), guitar cases and books piled up all over. Bedroom 4***** had boxes of stuff stacked up in the exact same place I put them down when I moved in five years ago.
The rooms I actually live in are quite civilised.
I have too much space and no incentive to tidy it away* The stuff is all spread around on the floor when it could be up in the loft (or burned). One day I may get organised with some shelving or ::winces:: cupboards.
******This will change when my parents next visit (other visitors I don’t care but my Mum will nag like a very naggy thing). I will at least have to [del]hide[/del] tidy up the dozens of wine bottles (full) around the place.
My only “living alone” experience so far has been in my own room of a dorm suite. There was a noticeable layer of dust, but that was the only messy thing about it. My roommates were continually amazed that I actually kept dirty clothes in the laundry basket, instead of piled on the floor, and that my clean clothes were all in the closet, instead of piled on the chair. I can’t function below a certain level of cleanliness.
The house gets cleaned weekly. I do it in two evenings. I divided up my house into two zones. Zone one is both bathrooms, my bedroom and the kitchen. I clean those one night. Zone two is the living room, dining room, guest bedroom and my study. It takes longer to clean Zone one because I insist on having the kitchen and bathrooms spotless. Doing it this way, I figure I’m house cleaning about four hours a week. Laundry gets done weekly. I try to do ironing weekly but it usually ends up being monthly. Hey, at least it’s clean laundry hanging up in my laundry room. I change the sheets on my bed weekly. The sheets in the guest room get changed whenever someone stays in it. I don’t consider myself a neat freak, but I do like my house tidy.
[QUOTE=swampbear]
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hijack
What, do you think, is the reason your tidy? I know mine is a Pavlovian thing to mess when I was growing up. Things were just…safer…when the place was picked up, and now I get really uneasy when disorder manifests itself.
/hijack
your/you’re/yor … it’s all interchangable.
Every saturday I sweep, mop and dust. dishes are done every night. Stove and appliances are cleaned when something is spilled. Laundry is in one of those cool wicker baskets with the linen lining. shower scrubbed once a month. It’s easier now that I’m single to purge and clean. The only thing “untidy” would be the 5 or 6 books I’ve got lying around reading.
Oddly enough, I wash my bedding every 2 weeks or so but I never make my bed, I guess I’m a pig. 
I’m apparently anal-unretentive, and let’s just leave it at that
[QUOTE=Inigo Montoya]
[QUOTE=swampbear]
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I dunno, maybe my gay genes are more advanced than Sampiro’s?
Seriously, I think it’s because I was taught how to keep things clean. My mother made sure that my sister, my three brothers and I learned how to sweep, mop, dust, vacuum, do laundry, iron, fold laundry, put it away, cook, wash dishes and put them away and all those domesticated type things. I believe the reason I do it, is I learned how and grew up being taught to keep things clean. We were also taught things like how to make a grocery list, plan for meals and all that stuff. Sometimes I don’t do that so well, but I know how to when I want to.
My younger brother was always somewhat of a slob (may he rest in peace), so it didn’t take for all of us, but my sister, my older brothers and I are all pretty good about keeping neat homes.
I think I need to call mom tonight and thank her.
Oh, forgot this earlier…can we tag on the question ‘how clean is your car?’ (interior!) Mine’s undeniably a pigsty. Something to do with eating about five meals a week in there…
Pristine. Armorall’ed it last week in fact.
Total pigsty. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if I got a summons from the health or fire departments.
Dishes get washed and the toilet gets scrubbed on a weekly basis, the bathtub and sinks get scrubbed on a monthly basis. I don’t let the place get downright unsanitary, but it gets incredibly cluttered and dusty. At any given time, there are books, magazines, newspapers, dirty clothes, empty soda cans and beer cans all over the place, piled on top of furniture or just lying on the floor. Piled in one corner of the living room are six or seven old Macintosh computers I keep telling myself I’ll use for one purpose or another someday. (Yeah, right.) I have a spare bedroom full of nothing but junk–old boxes, broken electronic items, an old exercycle, cardboard boxes large and small, hundreds and hundreds of old books I’ll never read again, scratchy old LP’s, piles of old magazines, and God knows what else. In the bedroom, there’s a mattress on the floor and dirty clothes and comic books covering the rest of it. In the living room you’ll find crude bookshelves made of cinder blocks and boards, and cable spools serving as end tables. The couch is totally worn out. There are spots in this apartment that literally haven’t been dusted since I moved in fifteen years ago.
It ain’t much, but it’s home.
I’m no longer single, but there is a difference to me between clean and tidy.
Clean is sanitary - what my kitchen and bathroom need to be so I don’t get sick and the place doesn’t stink like old urine and last week’s fish heads.
I’m pretty particular about keeping clean. Tidy is a whole 'nother story. My desk can look like the New York Stock Exchange floor at 5 PM, but I still manage to find what I need. Likewise the kitchen cabinets. As long as the soup is in a “food” cabinet and the plates are in a “dishes” cabinet, I’m pretty happy. I don’t have the time or inclination to alphabetize the soup.
My car is an oasis in an ugly, dirty, litter-filled world.
In other words, I keep it spotless.
Depending on my mode, I can be a Rita Rudner man, or have everything clean, clean, clean. When I’m in clean mode, everything gets cleaned. My mother did “spring” cleaning a couple times a year, where everything in the house got moved, vacuumed under, scrubbed, dusted, freshened, changed, replaced, detailed, or polished. I mean, even the lintel moulding above the door got dusted and the walls were wiped down. This was a family effort, no person spared, all-day cleaning.
Then there’re the in between times. My worst was when I broke my wrists, was kind of depressed after getting the casts off and finding out that I was still kind of crippled for a while, and didn’t feel like doing much of anything for months afterward. There were dishes in the kitchen that had been sitting there long enough for the mold corpses to have been eaten by mold. I’ve never let things get that bad again.
Most of the time, I clean the kitchen once or twice a week. I only have enough dishes for about 3-4 days, so I can’t get away with less than that. I change the sheets about once a month, unless I’ve been, um, doing stuff. Then, the sheets get changed not long after she leaves. I have a moderate amount of clutter. Moving once every 1.5-2 years on average tends to discourage pack-rat behavior. The biggest source of clutter is probably my book collection, then the DVDs and a few video tapes. I do laundry when I’m close to running out of underwear, t-shirts, and socks (all of which I change daily) so that’s about once every 2-3 weeks or so.
Not too bad, on the whole. My fiancee is a little cleaner in some ways, I’m cleaner in others. Between the two of us, we’ll probably keep things pretty neat when we move in together in a few weeks. Before she comes, I’ve got lots to do though; I’ve been in ursine mode for a while.
Juuuuuuust filthy enough to reassure women I can’t possibly be one of those “down low” Atlanta gay brothers they keep reading about.
As long as there is no mold anywhere, you won’t get a summons.
As anyone ever seen the show Clean House. Now there are some really dirty houses. Also, some magazine has a contest for the filthiest college apartment of the year. forgot which one.
Spotless Dodge grand caravan, just vacuumed, washed and waxed last week. Smells like cigars though, I do a lot of smoking while I drive.