Cazzle pretty much summed up my situation, too. I just moved into a new place a few months ago, and bit by bit the clutter is forming, despite my occasional vows to “put everything away” which generally ends up being “move a few things around until I get distracted or think of something I’ve mean meaning to check up online”.
I am much more the oscar madison type than the felix unger type. It is due to a complete and utter indifference to clutter. I just don’t notice it.
I am gone 12 hours a day between work and the commute. I come home, let out the dogs, feed the horses, feed the dogs and cats, then feed myself. That usually leaves me about 2 hours before I have to go to bed then do it all over again. I feel I deserve a couple hours of relaxation. On the weekends I do the dishes (not as bad as it sounds because it’s only me and I rarely cook, so there aren’t many), sweep the floor, do the laundry, mow the grass and sort of de-grunge a bit. But there’s always going to be track-in dirt and dog and cat hair. There will be clothes piled on my bed.
And I’m single - who do I have to impress?
StG
Because I live alone and it doesn’t bother me.
If it were too neat, I’d be afraid of messing it up.
This our family’s story as well.
And to be completely honest – my wife and I refuse to spend two hours nightly cleaning up after the kids. We just won’t do it. Therefore, the mess piles up. We do a thorough cleaning every month or two for when we host company.
I have thought about starting a thread about how people keep their houses super-neat and clean with small children in the house. But I keep thinking that the responses won’t be helpful to people who won’t do the daily cleaning (like us :o ).
Because I get lazy and let it happen, even though I don’t like it.
I actually quite dislike living in the clutter that I produce. It does, in fact, impede me at times; if the counters are cluttered, it’s hard to work, when the schoolroom is messy, it’s hard to have school because I’m trying not to trip over things and there are papers all over the desks. And I find mess unpleasant; when things are clean, I feel much happier, like a weight has been taken off me. At the same time, I have a very busy life and cleaning tends to get pushed down the list.
So right now I’m working on teaching the kids to do more chores, and then I have to have things prepared for them. The counter has to be clean so that kid#1 can stack clean dishes on it for me to put up in the cupboard. I’ve realized that the kids can do a lot more than I had been having them do, and that I need to train them for adulthood better by consistently helping them learn to run a house. So we are gradually assigning chores for morning, midday, and evening that need to be done daily, and I think that will help us a lot. Oldest kid likes being useful, she’s at a good age–younger kid (5) is very very distractable, but having a list she can understand really helps her.
My mom tried to train me, but I was pretty resistant. I wasn’t the world’s greatest roommate in college, because I never noticed that dishes needed doing or anything. I hope my kids will be better prepared for their adulthood, but if that’s going to happen I need to start now and be better myself.
Our house is hardly a slovenly heap, but it is messier than some for the following reasons:
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I have a toddler. I involve him in cleaning his stuff, but usually for him putting things in a box means that you get to dump the box out again. I simply don’t have the inclination to put things in and out of a box ten times until it gets old. When he’s completely done with it, we clean it up. But as soon as it’s put away, he wants it out again. That’s just the nature of the beast.
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I have a husband who procrastinates a lot and spent his life until college with an army of servants who cleaned up for him. I don’t feel responsible for his stuff and, though he has the best intentions, he’s not great about helping around the house. Given that up until recently I had a full time job by day and a toddler to deal with at night, spending the time it would take to clean the house at night by myself is just not gonna happen. Now I spend my days drumming up my own business, so it’s not like I’m sitting on the couch watching TV all day.
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My husband files in piles. That’s just the way his mind works and he gets annoyed when the piles are gone and he can’t find anything.
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I’m tired from 1 & 2.
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I don’t want my time with my toddler and my husband to be monopolized by cleaning. The last thing I want my kid to remember when he was young was his mom running around frantically cleaning up after him and his dad.
There’s always something more interesting to be doing than cleaning.
What I don’t understand is people who can’t relax if there is clutter. I don’t notice clutter until it gets in my way.
I’m a pretty tidy person. My husband is not. It used to drive me crazy until I realized that I’m just much more visually-oriented than he is. I *notice *socks on the floor, dirty dishes on the coffee table, etc. He truly doesn’t. It plays out in other ways, too. I love art museums. He couldn’t care less. I care what color our walls are and what the kitchen cabinets look like. He’s totally indifferent. Visual stuff just doesn’t register with him the same way that it does for me. I suspect a lot of messy people are like him.
It’s funny, because I’m totally one of those people. Having a dirty house stresses me out. On the other hand, I don’t mind cleaning. I actually find it satisfying to make order out of chaos.
Our house could be cleaner. I’m a SAHM too. We have an almost 2yo child, with another on the way. Soon as I clean up her toys, she wants to pull them back out again. The family room will stay clean for a few hours in the evening, but that still leaves the kitchen and bedrooms.
We have this nice countertop area that’s part of the kitchen and part of the family room and it just seems to be a catch all for everything of ours. It’s impossible to keep clean! Everything up there has some sort of purpose, and yet there’s no other place for it.
I make sure the dishes are done, and the sink rarely stays full for more than a day. I know everything is lost when the dishes are piled up and we have nothing to eat on or cook in. I lived that way growing up and I don’t want my family to live like that.
I can’t expect my husband to do more cleaning than me since he’s out of the house all day bringing home the bacon. I don’t want to spend the time we all have together as a family cleaning either. I try the spend 15-30 mins picking up, but it just never seems to be enough sometimes. I wouldn’t want a house cleaner, because I’d inevitably be cleaning before they came. Our house isn’t a pig sty it’s just cluttered in areas. /sigh
I’m a big fan of the philosophy “If you clean as you go, you’ll never have to deal with big messes” but inevitably I always slip and things start piling up. The bigger the pile gets, the less inclined I am to deal with it until I can’t ignore it any longer.
I don’t even put away laundry. I have two hampers, Clean and Dirty. As clothes get used, they go in the Dirty hamper. After a week, I wash them, then dump them in the Clean hamper, then take from it as the next week progresses. My job isn’t formal enough that I have to worry about ironed shirts, or I’d probably make a greater effort. My room is also inefficiently set up; my dresser is actually in the closet, and there’s a mess of computer-related crap in front of the closet doors preventing them from opening easily. :smack: It’s all interrelated.
As usual, Sampiro said it best.
Also, we have a very small house, and it has even less (significantly less) closet space than our old two bedroom apartment had. The garage is also much smaller. Sometimes finding a place to actually put a particular object away is a struggle. There is a small pile of electronics and computer periferals sitting across the room from me right now, on top of a small console just inside the dining room. It’s been there since my husband rebuilt his computer a couple of months ago, since the “leftover computer crap” crates in the closet in the basement are currently full. We’re not sure where else to put them, and we don’t want to toss perfectly good hard drives and such. Joining them on the console are a pile of books that we’ve been reading. (They used to live on the bottom shelf of the coffee table, but the puppy took it into his head to eat a couple of them one day.) And a couple of license plates from when I bought the new car, which we need to return to the DMV at some point. And a World of Warcraft action figure that my husband got as a birthday gift, and the action figure section of his desk is full. I think that’s everything. (If you’re wondering, we can’t put this stuff inside of the console because it’s currently full of pet items and a quasadilla maker that my mother gave us at Christmas.)
We have lots of pets (two dogs, four cats, a very large cage for a small lizard, and a fishtank), so keeping up with the feeding, walking, and cleaning necessary to keep them healthy takes priority over cleaning the clutter off of the side table. We also prioritize things that keep us healthy over putting away clutter (doing dishes, cleaning the bathroom, taking out the trash and recycling, laundry, vacuuming the carpet, etc.). If I make it down the list to dusting, wiping down the kitchen appliances, and vaccuming off the sofa and cat tree, that week’s a win.
I do make some effort to have the living room look like mature adults live there, but we’re the only ones who ever enter our bedroom, so it just isn’t a priority. We don’t have the closet or drawer space to put all of our clothes away, so we have them piled on the top of both dressers. As long as they’re folded and sorted, it doesn’t make any real difference.
And making the bed rates at the very bottom of the list due to personal prejudice. I loathe pointless chores, and that’s the ultimate. No one’s going to see it other than the cats, and you’re just going to mess it up again that night.
This is true for us, too. We’re packrats. We accumulate stuff. It’s frustrating to try to put stuff away if you know going into it that you’re not going to find a place for all the stuff.
So many books . . . so little time. Have to prioritize.
Because you haven’t come over to clean it yet. I promised you cake and everything.
We’re packrats, too. I blame our hobbies 
Most of both my husband’s and my own hobbies are the sorts that involve the accumulation of objects. A lot of the clutter in our place is that it always seems kind of pointless to put something away I’m just going to want to take back out in a little bit. Or to return the thing the kitten just knocked off the coffee table to its rightful position for the twentieth time today. It always seems that no sooner do I put something away (or, rather, go through the effort of finding somewhere in which to store it, reorganize matters so that it can be stored, and then put it there), someone wants it. It always makes me feel like the effort spent in putting it away was wasted. Irrational, but there you go.
Plus, clutter honestly doesn’t bother me at all.
My house is a mess and I’m a very visually-oriented person. I notice little things others have no clue about, I am very particular about what I wear and how I look, and I place great emphasis on beauty. I just hate housework and feel like doing them is a loss of precious time. I’m positive I won’t regret my messy house when I lay on my death bed, but I might well regret all the thousands of hours of housework that didn’t lead to anything of worth. Keeping a house tidy is just too much work, especially since the things I really care about tend to make a mess.
I am with you. I am reading this thread and I actually envy those that can look at the clutter around them and ignore it. I can not stand things not in their place, clutter on counters or anything on tables. I couldn’t sleep knowing there was a dirty dish in the sink and can’t leave the house unless the beds are made.
And yes, after working ten hour days I spend two hours cooking,cleaning,washing dishes and doing laundry but I find it more relaxing then sitting around watching television.
My friend’s DIL is like this. DIL’s daughter is three and DIL (Tara) is a freak for clean. It’s already affecting the little girl. She was flower girl in a wedding awhile back. But instead of scattering flower petals in the aisle, she followed the other little flower girl and picked up the petals. The guests cracked up. “Yeah, that’s Tara’s daughter!”
My place isn’t messy but my floors could be cleaner. I hate vacuuming and mopping.