To me it is a matter of priorities. Right now I need to be cleaning but I just picked up my cat from the hospital where he has been for the past 3 days so instead of cleaning I am online and I have a happy, purring kitten in my lap. Making sure he feels loved is more important to me right now than mopping the kitchen. Here in about an hour I’ll start the cleaning process and my boyfriend is coming over after work to help me (the mess bothers him more than it does me) so that my place will be tidy by tomorrow night when I have company. I absolutely will not sacrifice the happiness and well being of myself or my pets so that I can live without clutter. I know some people who seem to miss out on some of the best parts of life because they needed to dust or sweep or whatever and that makes me sad for them.
For me, it doesn’t seem like that much work–admittedly, I don’t have kids. I probably spend 3-4 hours a week on housework, not counting daily kitchen cleaning. To me, that’s worth it in terms of having a clean, comfortable, welcoming home. But I tend to clean as I go, and my mother trained me early on how to do housework quickly and efficiently, so I might be faster at it than some people.
But you’ve already admitted that you enjoy cleaning. For someone who hates it, or even just doesn’t care that much, that’s a lot of time wasted when they could be doing something else.
I suspect that I’m faster than average. My mom was a housecleaner, and couldn’t afford childcare, so I spent most of my childhood vacation days at someone else’s very large house helping her clean. And she had high standards. It left me with a disinclination to clean my own place, an abiding hatred of baseboards, a compulsion to go really overboard once I do start cleaning, and the firm conviction that it wasn’t how I was going to spend the rest of my life. All of the other daughters of cleaning ladies that I know ended up the same way.
I absolutely do not enjoy cleaning the house or washing the dishes or the clothes or any of that. But even more, I cannot stand living in a mess. So the pain from mess > pain of cleaning.
Not all of us who are neat like to clean. I clean because living in a messy environment is anathema to me. I’m fast at it now but doubt I will ever truly enjoy the process.
Because the cats persistantly refuse to clean the house while I’m at work, freeloading little bastards.
My SAH husband is only slightly better than the cats, but at least he tries sometimes. He’s good with laundry and cleans the cat boxes, and if there are actually dishes in the sink he will often wash most of them (while ignoring the rest of the kitchen). Sadly, he does not actually see dirt or clutter unless it is in his side of the closet, which is kept fanatically neat. Go figure. So, until I’m no longer working obscenely long hours and can put in some cleaning time, things are just going to stay messy.
Seriously? Because I’ll come organize your place for cake. It’s chocolate right?
My mom is super organized and a recovering neat freak (OCD, now on drugs). My sister is organized. My dad and I are pack rats. I try, I really do. I just don’t like putting the time in every day. I try to limit the size of the piles.
I don’t loathe cleaning, but it certainly isn’t my idea of a fun time. Especially after working all day. I suck it up because I know that physical clutter = mental clutter for me. I can’t sit down and watch TV if the TV is covered in a layer of dust, and I can’t sleep in a messy bedroom because it isn’t restful to lay there surrounded by clutter.
I’m being forced to relax my standards a little, though, because the house is a construction project right now and will be for the forseeable future.
This is me. This, and the fact that the mess just doesn’t bother me at all. We are gross-free (no roaches or mold or anything like that), it’s all just clutter that gets strewn aroun from one place to another. Our house isn’t really big enough to hold our stuff (and we don’t really have much, considering there are five of us) so to put one thing away, you have to take something else out.
FTR, I’m going to clean as soon as I’m done here. The windstorm put a quick halt to our progress the other day.
I agree with Cazzel’s mom. After a while it seems (some) people just don’t notice the mess anymore. Things pile up until circumstances force you to really look at your environment.
The only reason my house isn’t knee-deep in car fur is because every other week the cleaning lady comes and vacuums. It’s amazing how little bits of green paper motivate people. For those of you who would like a clean house, but hate to clean; do the math on
a) how valuable your non-work time is to you
b) how many hours it takes to clean house
c) how many hours at work it takes to pay your local cleaning lady
You might find it’s worth it.
Oh, it would absolutely be worth it to me. Unfortunately, the very idea makes my husband twitch. He doesn’t want anyone in the house without us being there.
I’m in the “there are a hundred better things to do then clean” crowd.
The kitchen is kept fairly neat, the living room gets straightened every couple of days, and the bathrooms get cleaned. But I can’t tell you the last time I actually dusted a whole room. The bed doesn’t get made. Any clean laundry that doesn’t wrinkle badly is frequently in a “clean laundry” basket.
I get to pick. Dust, do some yard work, continue the shower replumbing job. Dusting or straightening magazines just doesn’t seem that important.
It is certainly worth it but even with the cleaning lady doing the floors, bathrooms and dusting…it still takes me an hour or two each night to do the dishes, laundry, sweep and pick up from the kids. Too bad I can’t afford her every day.
I think it is important to me that anyone can stop by any time and everything will be neat and tidy.
My GF and I live in a 1 BR appartment so we don’t have enough room to store a lot of the random crap that accumulates.
Plus she’s a total freakin slob.
She was raised in slobery in the rural “country crap” style. You know, where there is just the most random shit that just sticks around for years. For the longest time, I always assumed her parents house was the way it was because they were renovating a room or someone was moving in or out. Turns out they just live like that with boxes of knick-knacks, weird oversized planters that belong in a parking lot and other odds and ends that make a home look like a fleamarket.
I was raised in the “suburban preppy” style where everything didn’t need to be perfect or new, but everything fit together, it had a place and every now and then you put it in it. And of course there was the “museum dining room”. You know, the one no one used except on holidays.
So basically, my gf is incapable of seeing the clutter and mess around the house because to her it looks normal and when the appartment is clean, it looks unnaturally sterile.
With working two jobs and generally running around with my head cut off, I tend to come in, drop shit and then run out again. Generally by the end of the week it is a mess and I am hoping to god that no one just shows up. I try to clean at least once a week or tiddy up a bit but I am not overly concerned about it.
When I win the lottery, I’ll have a live-in maid.
Are your kids old enough to start picking up after themselves? I’m guessing not if laundry is a daily occurance. Still early training pays off, as demonstrated upthread in the flower-girl story.
There are things I love to do that I don’t get to do four hours per week. To me, four hours off the maybe 20 I have to spare would be a very stiff price, even if cleaning wasn’t as dull as it is. Different strokes…
Risha’s reply brought back memories from my youth, when my early saturday-morning sleep was unfailingly interrupted by the sound of furious hoovering and my mom bursting in yelling: “Ok, time to get up and start cleaning!” Early on, I associated cleaning the house with stress, tension and lack of sleep. Now that I think about it, all three of us siblings are messy people. Thanks, mom!
I find it hard to understand why cleaning a house is such a chore, I raised 7 children, led 4H, helped remodel a house,made all my children’s clothes and my husbands trousers,I baby sat 3 children plus my own, I canned a great deal of our food, and at one time my husband was in the hospital for 6 weeks I worked nights in a factory. I still had time for having luncheons etc. It is mostly a matter of organizing, When my youngest started high school I had a cleaning service, I did very large homes and my own. I had a wringer washer that I had to keep the wringer running with a big screw driver, and the agitator with a big wrench. I hung the clothes out on the line. When my 4th child was born I was able to get a washer and dryer. I did our yard work for many years. My husband worked hard and a long distance away so he was gone from dawn to dusk. We moved to a small farm and then he milked a cow, fed the sheep, cleaned the barns and chicken coop after work and on weekends.
My children at school age each had to make their own bed,I ran a sink full of hot soapy water and they put their breakfast dishes in that, I washed them later. There are many jobs that can be done at once,on busy days I put a roast in the oven and got the potatoes peeled and in cold water. The children had to hang their clothes up and put any garbage etc. in a basket.
For a punishment if they were bad I made them pull 25 weeds from the lawn
Monavis
My answer exactly.
An immaculate home is the sign of a wasted life.
Anon.
I can deal with a little clutter, but my kitchen HAS to be clean. If it’s not, 1) it’s unsanitary and 2) I can’t cook. We finally had to come up with an agreement whereas my roommates and I have separate dishes and pots and pans, because I was getting pissed at my pans sitting dirty for days, and I refuse to clean up someone else’s mess so that I can use the pans. Now, at least, I can dump their mess on the table, so I can at least get some cooking done.