I’m pretty much motivated by embarrassment. Even if people rarely come over here…what if someone DOES come here? What if they come here and there are dishes in my sink and dog hair all over the carpet and mail on the table? What will they think? I’m already fat and socially awkward, I don’t need people thinking I’m messy too.
I have a roommate now (well, a tenant) and he lives here for free in exchange for him cleaning the house once a week. Turns out that this arrangement keeps me tidier than ever because I don’t want him to have to clean up after actual messes from me. The most he gets is dust, dog hair and a few dirty dishes. Even though we’ve been friends for 20 years now I can’t imagine him thinking I’m messy.
You have it in you to be neurotic, and care what other people think. I remember the crudite!
So get neurotic and think about what the exterminator and landlord would say about you after they left your house. Think about how the EMT would treat you if one had to respond to an emergency amidst your mess. Think about how much sadder your sister and mom would be if you died AND they had to deal with your messy house. Tsk tsk.
The biggest issue I had originally was that I didn’t have the house to fit all the stuff I wanted to have. So I had to be quite hard on myself about bringing new stuff into the house.
Now that I have a big house, I’ve invested in a lot of storage furniture. So what might be a mess on your living room floor is potentially a mess in my cupboard, but my house looks tidier because you don’t see it.
I do agree with the sentiment of DO IT NOW. That’s also true for cleaning, which is different to tidying. I’m got a much bigger kitchen now and I had a bad habit of not really cleaning up floor spills because my old kitchen was tiny and only took a few sweeps with the mop. Now it’s a 15 minute job to properly mop my kitchen floor, so when I spill stuff, I clean it up there and then, so I only have to mop once a month.
Picked up the clutter in the living room, threw a bunch of random papers we don’t need in the recycle bin, got the laundry into the washer, “dusted” (actually, I used disinfectant wipes, because while I normally abhor the things, we have some for some reason, and we’ve recently gone through a round of chest colds/pneumonia, so it seemed like a good idea today) and then I got a little OCD with the wipes and very thoroughly cleaned my SO’s laptop, which was sitting on the coffee table. Turns out his keyboard is grey when it’s not brown with gunk! (Ew!)
See a clean living space as something that you don’t want to lose, because you prefer it over mess. It’s just like your walking regimen. Make putting stuff away a part of your daily routine, so that when you don’t do it, you feel guilty.
It’s not about training yourself to care. You actually do care (or else you wouldn’t have started this thread). It’s about committing yourself to doing something that goes against your natural behavior. Give yourself the same advice you’d give to your obnoxious co-worker about losing weight.
The same goes for your cats. You want them to be happy, so force yourself to make time for them until it because more natural. It’s not about caring. It’s about doing.
I’ve never lived in squalor. It’s been messy, certainly, but I can’t imagine letting it get all that bad to where my furniture is under stuff. Not judging at all because I fully understand the aversion to cleaning, but man… that sucks.
I absolutely hate cleaning which is my motivation for keeping it clean because then I never have to clean. How? By cleaning all the time. Every time I move between rooms, something gets picked up or put away or thrown in the garbage. I wash my dishes as someone else suggested, after every meal. I do a load of laundry a day (I have two kids so this is possible) even though I HATE WASHING CLOTHES SO MUCH OMG because that saves me from having mountains of dirty clothes at the end of the week and my 8 year old telling me that he doesn’t have anything to wear while I’m digging through drawers and baskets hoping to find clean socks.
I have a schedule for “big jobs”. I change everybody’s sheets and wash linens once a week on the same day whether I want to or not, whether I care or not, and usually I really don’t. Hard floors are swept daily as needed but only mopped once a week. I hate floors (except vacuuming, I don’t mind that) so I delegated that to Ben. And once a week he sweeps and mops every hard floor. The day that he does floors, I’m vacuuming and dusting (which I typically do not do during the rest of the week). My “big jobs” really take about 10 minutes. I only schedule it because it’s not something I’m going to do every single day and if I don’t schedule it, it’ll never get done.
I have, like I said, two kids. I don’t have time or energy to spend, you know, two hours or whatever cleaning something.
I don’t care about cleaning. I care about my littlest, who is still in the “Let’s eat this and see what happens” stage, so that’s some extra motivation but mostly I punish myself if I don’t keep a clean house. So for you, I would say your art is on hold until you wash your dinner dishes, or clean the toilet, or whatever.
While it’s not for everyone, another potential solution to the laundry is to use a laundry service. My local laundry will accept your soiled clothing, bed linens, area rugs, etc. and wash, dry, and return them neatly folded. They’ll even use a particular soap if you supply it, likewise fabric softener (or not) as you choose. Yes, there is a charge for this service, but if you hate it enough, or you’re pressed for time, or whatever, this might be useful. The people I see using the service aren’t super-wealthy or anything. Sometimes it’s a stay at home mother who drops the kids’ stuff off a couple times a week so she can spend her time doing other things. Sometimes it’s a single guy living in a tiny place and working his butt off, so he pays for someone to do his laundry instead of spending one of his few “free” hours doing it. Last summer when I was working two jobs I paid to have a couple loads done. Some people only use the service for big jobs, like bedding, or for seasonal cleaning, or after a broken pipe/flood when EVERYTHING has to be cleaned. It’s an option people don’t always consider, but it is out there and some people swear by it.
Another vote for “chip away at an area at a time” and it truly is amazing how much you can get done in 10-20 minutes when you put your mind to it! I’ll put on a CD and do nothing but clean until the CD ends. I am a list-maker, and find them really helpful. Especially when I include little, mundane tasks (take the raincoat off the couch and hang the damn thing up) - it takes ten seconds, and yippee, I can cross something off.
I am disorganized too, and living alone makes it easy to let things slide. But, it really bothers me when there’s clutter, so that’s my incentive.
Back when I had less discretionary time and more money, I hired some tasks out. Once a week, I had someone come in and do floors: nothing but floors. It forced me to pick everything else up, and it was lovely to come home to the odor of Murphy’s Oil Soap, vacuumed carpets and rugs and the pound or so of accumulated dog and cat hair gone, gone, gone. For $20.00.
I’ve also at times used laundry services. Currently the only thing I routinely have done is mowing…I have a very large lot, loathe mowing, and a neighbor has a riding mower and is happy to get $25 to ride over and do my lawn, and it’s worth it to me.
I don’t give a shit either about how my house looks. I could live in total slatternly slobbish clutter (not filth tho - I do actually get worked up over dirt) I just don’t have an upper threshold for clutter/mess.
However, I have internalized the Southern Hostess Gene, and so I do care what my friends and family think about my residence.
Easy solution for me - make sure some outside person (who’s opinion matters to me) is visiting my house at least once a week. Any longer than that and things get dumped behind closed doors, any shorter and I feel stressed by the Hostessing Requirements.
Works like a charm. I never have enough time to let things get awful, and the visits are always close enough that when I’m tempted to drop the socks on the floor instead of sorting them, I have to think whether I’ll have another chance to fold them before people come over.
I have accepted that I will NEVER be internally motivated to have a clean house. That’s fine, I just had to figure out a stable external motivator. It works for me!
Now if I could only figure out an external motivator to keep my yard kept up with.
Here’s a simple rule that may help. If your thinking about leaving something on the floor or in your case also the bed. Don’t. Put it where it belongs whether that’s the cupboard, fridge, pantry, shelf, closet , garbage etc… It’ll only take you a couple of seconds to deal with a particular item then and there.
I have people over All The Time. I’m a crazy cat lady, currently I have 10 fosters and 2 perm cats. I worry so much about how people will think about my home that I’m almost obsessive about cleaning.
If I didn’t have so many cats, I might not clean so much.
OTOP, I’m the person who carries a gun to stop me from having road rage.
Yup. I cleaned my house top to bottom for a Halloween party last year, and it looked so nice that I figured I would try to make a habit out of keeping it clean. I decided which things needed to get cleaned weekly (bathrooms, kitchen, sweep floors, vacuum rugs, tidy things up), and have been making a habit of it ever since.
You could try cleaning for half an hour a day and making crafting your reward. The reality is that everyone* has to clean their house, or they’ll live in squalor, and most people don’t want to live in squalor.
This strikes a chord with me. I love shopping thrift stores, yard sales, good junk places. I bring all kinds of stuff home and it sits around in various states of dustiness until I finally one day find something to use it for, someone who wants it, or until the pile it’s in gets so unstable it endangers my animals. I always have piles of things waiting to be read, and I always get to them eventually and pass them on so someone else can put them in a pile. If the other side of my bed didn’t already have a pile of dogs on it, it would have stacks of books, notebooks and magazines. Periodically I purge my collection and start all over again. Unlike what I’ve seen with hoarders, I don’t really care who touches my stuff or where it ends up. I usually forget I have it until I’m looking for something completely different. It’s the collecting of and the possibilities inherent in found or nearly-found objects that I like.
When I think hoarding, I think of piles of trash, empty soda bottles, rat feces, housing inspectors, what we used to call garbage houses. I have no attachment to scraps of paper or old Slurpee cups. I’m just a child of children of the Depression and I save things that might come in handy at some point, a trait I acquired at my mother’s knee. Unfortunately, I also inherited my dad’s disorganization and absent-mindedness so sometimes things get a little out of control, but I keep hoping I’ll grow out of that.
monstro, I think you’re being a little too hard on yourself. Some of us just don’t have the cleaning bug. My husband is an absolute neat freak and can sweep through the first floor of our house, neatening and straightening and wipening and scrubbening the whole place in an hour and not even break a sweat. When I decide to clean, it takes me that long to find the Endust, and then when I go to look for a dust rag I get distracted by a sparkly thing and the whole project just goes down the terlet from there.
What I do to keep from letting the house just fill up with dust around me is have specific days for certain tasks; for instance, Monday is laundry, Tuesday is kitchen, Wednesday is dusting, Thursday floors, and so on. I get something done in each of those broad areas about half the time, and I manage to stay just close enough to actual clean that I can spiff the place up in a couple of hours in case the in-laws decide to drop by. I have learned to accept that as good enough. There are a lot more important things I’d rather strive for perfection in.
Whenever I feel good enough to clean, I’ll start off thinking “Oh, I’ll just tidy up. throw away some stuff, (like magazines) put away the rest. I’ll end up going through my cupboards and throwing anything not used in 3 months.”
When I’m feeling really depressed, nothing gets done.
Monstro, it sounds like you need to make your house reflect your priorities more. That may be hard to do in a rental home, but it is still doable. For instance, if your bedroom is the most comfortable room in the house, and you love art, put a big table with art supplies there and have a small cot of a bed (or a murphy bed) in the corner. Or put your bed (or a bed/sofa) somewhere else, if al lyou do is speel in it. .
Put a large sheet of vinyl over the carpet in your living room Or kithcen) with an edge for easy cleaning and make that your hothouse part, including a pottingsoil table. Redecorate your window with glass shelves so you can put all your plants there.
You know what you like to do. That puts you ahead of most people. Make your house reflect those priorities, passions and preferences and facilitate them instead of marginalizing them as something that doesn’t belong in the bedroom/livingroom standard setup.
First, Watch a couple episodes of Hoarders on A&E or the other show on TLC.
That will inspire anyone to throw away every piece of useless crap in their house. After decluttering all the crap, then I can start cleaning.
I’ve always tried keeping a neat house. But, Hoarders disgusted me so badly that I won’t tolerate any clutter anymore. I’m not kidding. After seeing people with crap stacked five feet high in almost every square inch of their rooms I felt like vomiting. Next day I started filling up trash bins. I never, ever want my house to look anything like those sick freaks. If it’s sat around in the house untouched for a year then it’s useless shit that needs throwing out. I’m determined to live by that rule the rest of my life.
Here is my strategy: (1) Hire a person to clean, or a cleaning service (2) try to keep up with stuff so cleaning person/service doesn’t quit and so as not to disgrace the family name of Suze, if such a thing is possible (3) deal with the clutter, as the people I hire emphatically state they will avoid cleaning cluttered areas, and they really will. If shit is stacked on my desk, my desk will not get polished, or even dusted.
Now a couple of things play into this. One is that I am basically paying a person to do the part of cleaning I don’t mind so much (dusting, wiping, vacuuming) while I do the stuff I really don’t like (putting stuff away so there is no clutter). However, in the real world, if I do it all myself, nothing ever gets dusted or vacuumed and only the kitchens and bathrooms get wiped, because I don’t deal with the clutter and neither do my family members.
However…when the cleaning service is coming, suddenly everybody snaps to. Underwear is picked up, books are replaced in bookshelves, etc. Even the teenager picks up his room. Then the cleaning service comes through and makes everything clean and shiny.
The other thing I picked up is to clean like a pro. Now I know how pros do it. They work for a set time–say an hour–and then stop. That’s manageable.
That means 20 minutes of no StraightDope, but that’s okay.
I really would like to get rid of my bed. It takes up 70% of my room, leaving little room to do anything else in it. I’d love to chuck it and get a hammock. I can stretch it out at night and then fold it up in the morning. I wonder if 1800-JUNK will just take away a bed? If not, they can take the couches in the living room too. I could then replace them with colorful Adirondack chairs, accenting with cool pillows. That would create more room and less surface area to stack things on. Also, it would make me feel like I can just up and move whenever I want. I’m itching to move into a smaller place (like a 1.5 bedroom apartment).
Not to make excuses for my slobbery, but I do think the lack of temperature control in my apartment makes doing housework harder than it should be. It’s like my little place is an ice box in the winter and a hot box in the summer. I just did some sweeping and vacuuming early this morning (starting at 5:00 AM) and it started off very pleasant, but soon I was sweating all over. When I get home today to do some more clean-up, my apartment will be in the upper 90s, even when I turn on the fans.
I should move. I make enough money to afford a nicer place with better amenities, but I’ve got that inertia against change and spending money holding me back.
I’m in the same boat, off and on. Unlike you, I hate it when things are messy and dirty, but I still can’t keep things neat.The only way my home is ever clean is if I live with someone else who wants a clean home. It’s not even that they need to supervise or nag me, but if they have expectations I will live up to them. It’s when I’m on my own that things go to pot. I need another room mate. Or some Adderall.
At least I am not a hoarder. I don’t have a ton of stuff (just too many books and pet supplies) and I like purging belongings and papers when I get around to it.
Every so often I’ll clean for days and get everything spic and span, then do the ‘20 minutes per day’ (or ‘daily chore checklist that takes less than 1/2 hour’, whichever, thing for awhile. It does work, if you stick to it. Things only starts to spiral out of control again when it’s become messy enough that I’m stressed about it. Stress=avoidance and procrastination, and pretty soon I’m barely doing chores at all again…
