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Our living room has a half painted dresser that's been an ongoing project for over a year, the TV wires hang down the wall because I've not chased them in, and the fireplace is just leant against the wall.
The kitchen really needs re-doing but is kinda OK, apart from the mountain of crap on the table because it doesn't live anywhere else.
Conservatory - like a bigger version of the kitchen table.
etc
etc
etc
How do people who's houses perpetually look like show-homes do it!
Most of my rooms are like building sites with boxes and dust everywhere. Slowly getting there especially now the new woodburners will be installed later this week
[url= https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4341/37166464795_21a33f80de.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4341/37166464795_21a33f80de.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/YCgR8a ]image[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/windydave13/ ]Dave Aspinall[/url], on Flickr
[url= https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4356/36995109762_150a7b19a8.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4356/36995109762_150a7b19a8.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/Yn8Bf3 ]image[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/windydave13/ ]Dave Aspinall[/url], on Flickr
I see 'tidyness' in 2 aspects:
[b]clutter [/b](for which chex P frequently has an abundance), adn
[b]Dirt/filth[/b] - less so..the cleaner sees to this.
But year, clutter is a huge issue...
Too much 'stuff' just piles up...
I'll go through speights of just skipping/giving stuff away - I'd rather it go for free, than take up space in my life...
DrP
spotless. my teeth itch if there's clutter or dirt anywhere.
My children hate me, even though I only make them tidy the toy room two or three times a week 😀
I keep the house pretty clean. We have 3 cats so regular vacuuming and anything that is left out just gets in the way.
If I'm doing DIY then I only tend to do it if the job can be started and finished in one period to limit the amount of time the house is a mess.
Some places are a bit disorganised, like the under stairs cupboard and the loft but most of the living space is kept tidy.
Not as tidy as I'd like it in truth. 2 people who work long hours and spend any spare time cycling/running/at the gym means tidying is not a priority. It's not dirty, just not tidy either and could do with hoovering a bit more often.
We're currently debating a cleaner which kind of says it all.
From a structure/materials perspective its all fine - however with three kids, a dog and 2 messy parents (me and missus!) its a clutter disaster zone!
It's not dirty, just not tidy either and could do with hovering a bit more often.
Do you live in a helicopter?
Cool!
How do people who's houses perpetually look like show-homes do it!
It's not easy and ours kind of looks ok these days bacause it's been for sale. If I hadn't been forced into it, it would still be a cluttered mess full of dog hair.
And actually, since it sold, it kind of is again but it's cosmetic and if I could be arsed, it'd all be sorted in an afternoon with a Hoover and a cloth.
Decluttering is the hard part, especially when you have a penchant for books, retro bikes and musical instruments.
Ours is a lot bloody tidier now the kids are back at school*!
*Apart from one night last week when they went blackberry picking and made jam. It looked like a scene from a horror film with all the dark red splashes everywhere.
not very according to crankygirl , just fine according to me , not enough lego lying around according to crankbrat.
we have a flat roofed house with small rooms and no storage so life is a constant battle to get rid of or tidy up 2 adults life time collection of books, bikes for three , ever expanding lego and scalextrics collections and a load of furniture acquired from our respective families .
In terms of cleanliness all is fine the cleaner whose visits we clean and tidy for sees to that, best £30 a week we spend.
For those of you that get a cleaner, what sort of cost are you looking at? I presume you have someone pop round weekly...
Structurally ok, painting is done and that. But there are many things that dont have a home and don't look to be getting one anytime soon.
My parents house looks like a show home, always has. My dad was a stickler for everything being just so, he passed away a couple of weeks ago so I'm intrigued to see what my mom is actually like, I must have got my lackadaisical approach to housework from somewhere.
My wife is German...........
It's both very messy and quite dusty. The hall stairs and landing carpets are an absolute mess and need to be replaced. Massive problem with dust, and it's only ten years old. Probably due to the amount of clothes lying around that haven't been put away.
Working from home a lot means you need to take breaks, a lot. Once you've popped the kettle on 22 times a day it's time to start running around with a cleaning cloth, MrJizz in one hand and manic grin.
My place is spotless. Shoes are a mess under the stairs, found some pesky spiders cowering in the window sills and now the washing machine is doing its best to take off out into the wild blue yonder.
I'd class my cleanliness as upper middle class, meaning it's all healthily clean with the odd smattering of clutter.
😆
£20pw for a cleaner for 2hrs.
Since the house is always impeccably tidy cleaner doesnt waste valuable cleaning time. Floor mopped, bathrooms cleaned, and alternating weeks polishing surfaces or nailing spider webs.
Very untidy. Piles of stuff everywhere. Most horizontal surfaces have something stacked on them. Far far [i]far[/i] too many toys. Only one sofa is normally usable as the other has accumulated stuff on it. It's so bad that now when I can see the living room floor and most of the kitchen work surfaces I consider it "tidy".
Excuses:
- We both work, often long hours.
- It's a small house that doesn't have enough storage and we have too much stuff.
- We have two kids who can turn the tidiest room into a bomb site in less than three minutes.
- We're both terrible hoarders.
- We [s]are lazy[/s] have better things to do.
We do have a cleaner who comes once a week for two hours (£20), but she's not a miracle worker Jim!
a cleaning cloth, MrJizz in one hand and manic grin.
😯
You've overshared there. I don't want to know what you call it.
Very. It's just me and I'm hardly at home during the week. 1/2 of Saturday morning for tidying up the clutter if there is any, and another hour or so to push the hoover about and a laundry load each week.
I'm intrigued to know how having Mr Jizz in one hand helps with tidying up.
My wife has the third bedroom as her 'craft room'. It's an absolute tip, every level surface is covered with piles of stuff. So she ends up doing crafting elsewhere in the house, and half the time leaving stuff out everywhere. 'My' garage is as messy, but that also gets used for general household stuff and storage, and at least I don't spread out of it and start leaving bike bits and stuff all over the house.
If you're thinking of getting a clearner..do it!!
I love coming back from holiday to the house being really clean and tidy.. However, 2 young kids is simply not (easily) equatable to a tidy house..
Once the toddler is fed up with 'baby toys' we can clear the pile of gumph from the lounge (duplo/soft toy pile there)..
I think as kids age you go through tidy -> untidy -> tidy stages....
We're about to clear change tables etc etc from her room, so that'll clear that up.
I think, though, having a good 'de clutter' is paramount to a tidy life.
DrP
Superficially tidy (but don't open any cupboards as the resulting avalanche of clutter can maim or kill)
Is it wrong that the garage is the tidyest room in the house?
I find if one decorates the whole house in a stylish dickensian squalor,there is never any need to clean up.
Yep. We gave up on [i]Shabby Chic[/i] and stuck with shabby. 😀
For the most part it's immaculate.
LadyPanther is a powerhouse of organisation and neverending industry.
The PantherCubs are a different matter. The middle one is fastidious and tidy.
The other two have bedrooms that you could stir with a stick.
MrJizz in one hand and manic grin.
Yep, that's what working from home is all about.
Generally immaculate.
Can't live in anything else. I'm probably quite hard work to live with.
Total shambles I think would be about right.
Working full time and riding 5 days a week = time/energy for keeping on top of tidying up are about non-existent.
Usually manage to improve things to tolerable by taking a few days holiday and chipping away at it, but doesn't take long to return to looking like an explosion in a wiggle warehouse.
Not really, I can't think of a time that the whole house would be tidy, but it's a constant battle between Wife and Children.
I reckon that you never ever get round to sorting everything out that you need to sort until you retire. With both adults working full time so that when you do have free time you'll spend it relaxing, with the kids or pursuing hobbies *cough* cycling. Meh, WGAS!? life is for living, not for cleaning, (at least that's what I tell the wife as I'm rolling the bike out 😆 )
Ours oscilates from spotless show home to heavily disguised man trap in about 20 minutes. A 2yr and a 4yr old are largely responsible. My toys have nothing to do with it, honest gov'.
We should really get a cleaner, and a gardener.
davosaurusrex - Member
My wife is German...........
Ah, does she leave her lederhosen all over the place? Damn.
Meh, WGAS!? life is living not for cleaning
+2 (I've chipped a + in for Mrs P who is of the same opinion, despite being wracked with guilt when a relative has to come round.)
bikebouy - Member
... MrJizz in one hand...
😯
In a word, not.
Too much hoarded clutter and junk, plus little time to sort it, plus two kids, plus a million and one jobs that need doing yesterday, plus not enough storage.
It might be tidy when we move out.
Stoner - Member
...My children hate me, even though I only make them tidy the toy room two or three times a week
My granny used to come round and help my mother with the housekeeping.
She was ruthless. She'd tell us to tidy our rooms the day before and leave anything for out on the floor. She meant it and we learned. 🙂
There is superficial untidiness and there is endemic clutter. Ours falls into the former. Obviously I lack Mrs TiRed's spidey sense of seeing bike things, because they just don't signal on my radar. And that presently includes a race bike, race bag, shoes, two helmets,as set of TT wheels, tools, bag of spares and two small tin boxes of "Bike Stuff" currently out on display in the dining room. This does get tidied away eventually.
But...I'm a systematic but infrequent tidyer. She is the opposite. This often leads to the "Honey, where's my supersuit" conversations, because for her, tidying means putting it in the nearest receptacle. Not on the hanger in the cupboard to the LHS, between TT and old race skinsuits and never mixed with normal cycling jerseys.
She is very tolerant.
EDIT: Garden looks like a showhome, but we employ the Queen's Gardener who has worked a miracle.
Ours apparently does look like a showhome most of the time.
This will be because Mrs Squad is a housekeeper by trade and we don't have any children. If we did, it certainly wouldn't look like it does, and it wouldn't bother me at all. Homes are to be lived in.
Not quite Channel 5 'documentary' messy, but it'll get there one day given time.
Usually tidy, but not always as clean as I'd like. With a house, garage, bike, cars, garden and most especially children to clean and tidy, there's not enough time to do all of it, and I refuse to clean more than 2 hours per week.
Pretty showhome level here (so various people have told me). I am pretty badly dyslexic and have learnt over the years that being tidy and organised results in a much tidier mind and as a result I get in far less of a muddle in myself. Bless p20 - he has learnt to live with it. Only the two of us though, no doubt that helps.
Mine is definitely cluttered but it's clean(ish). There are occasions where I'm away all weekend and nothing gets done but it'll then get blitzed a week or so later.
My next door neighbours, a retired couple seem to spend their entire lives tidying. Their house is immaculate but that's offset by the fact that it stinks from 30 years of her smoking.
I couldn't live in a mess.
We have a daily routine of things being messed up, then tidied up before bedtime.
We had a cleaner for many years, before deciding we would rather spend our money on other things, but we still try to keep the house as clean as it was when we had it done by someone else.
Not very.
We moved house last year, safe in the knowledge that within a couple of months we would gut and redo the interior.
Fast forward 18 months, we've redecorated most of one bedroom and made a mess in the living room.
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At this rate it's going to be in a state of permanent mess for the next 10 years or so 😀
Meh, riding bikes and running and stuff is much more fun than fixing houses...
If you're thinking of getting a clearner..do it!!
It's all well and good saying that, but try finding one you can trust with a key and actually does a decent job. All the people I know with a good cleaner have this permanent smug look about them 👿
Clean & tidy ..but it's not a showhouse ..
Our kitchen floor is probably one of the most vacuumed floors in the country ..due to the fact that my missus is a mobile hair stylist with a 50 / 50 split of clients who she travels to or they visit here ..
Muggins here does more than his fair share of hoovering up ..The Miele cat & dog vacuum being my preferred weapon of choice
Retired doesn't mean tidier. When my wife worked I would do housework to make it easier for her. Now she's retired it's nobody's responsiblity and we operate a brinkmanship policy towards housework and we are both messy sods. She's worse than me for leaving stuff out but neither of us can be bothered mostly. Also we've lived in the same house for 35 years so lots of stuff. A couple of years ago we had a big push to declutter, got rid of stacks of stuff but that just meant the stuff at the back spilled forward. Who cares?
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Not too bad. A bit of mess in all rooms, but I can see the floor. I hoover once a week so that usually results in a kids tidy up to prevent toy-death-by-hoover. Above the floor level, not so good. Ready for Halloween would be polite.
ready for /thread ?
May I present, my "study":
(This, and the garage, is mine and kept tidy by me alone. The rest of the place is ruled by MrsPants and differs fundamentally)
[img][url= https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4334/36334543164_949d7eca46.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4334/36334543164_949d7eca46.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/XmL2NL ]tidy_mind[1][/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/23823661@N05/ ]scaredypants[/url], on Flickr[/img]
Oh my. I'd explode living in that.
I'd wager my garage is tidier than many houses based upon descriptions.
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[url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/152318156@N08/35667702325/ ]2017-07-02_12-12-29[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/152318156@N08/ ]Steve Weeks[/url] - [url= https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dariogf.flickr2BBcode_lite ]Flickr2BBcode LITE[/url]
This was a couple of weeks ago post cycle ride.
House itself, currently pretty close to perfect. Mrs Weeksy is away so its all mine to keep nice, dishes are washed and put away straight away etc.
There's two pieces of music on living room table and they'll go away later.
Being permanently single and having very few visitors = no need to keep flat tidy.
Piles of crap abound most flat surfaces, clothes lie in wait , ready to leap up and trip you in the blink of an eye.
I have a nice kitchen ,cant see much of the worktop though, covered in pots and bowls, water bottles , fruit , paper.
Lounge is better , but again paper is breeding and threatening a takeover bid for the sofas.
Back bedroom contains skis, ski bags , bike box, random cardboard boxes that I am convinced will be useful one day .Empty bottles awaiting a trip to the bottle bank also live here .
Garage , well that needs a complete re-work as its becoming unusable
We currently have 3 usable rooms out of 7 due to accumulated crap. And it's pretty dusty too - in fact I think mould in the playroom is a big cause of some respiratory maladies over the last year or so...
Battle lines have been drawn twixt me and the missus. I'm untidy but enjoy a good clearout and restructure. Garage is stuffed pretty full but you can find it all and get at it.
The better half... well, two stories from her past should have made me aware... At uni, her digs was broken into. Shared house with 4 other girls. Police attended and asked one of the girls if they could check each room and see what had gone. TV from this room, jewellery from that room. The wife's? Couldn't tell if they'd been in the room to ransack it.
Then we moved her out of her folks house. Her room was c 8ft x 8ft. We cleared shopping bags off the floor containing 28 BNWT tops. There were so many plastic bags that I filled 14 bags of plastic bags!
Happy days.
Living room - drawings on most walls and toys everywhere.
Bathroom - hole in the roof and paintwork coming off.
Kitchen - not bad
Dining room - currently being converted in to a playroom for Funk Jr and the soon to be Funk Mk3. So properly messy.
Two Bedrooms - somebody could move in while we're out and we wouldn't be able to see them for all the shite.
If I lived alone there'd be a couple of bikes, turntable, amp, speakers and a Kindle 🙁
My family are lazy degenerates so I make them pay for a cleaner, its still a tip though.
The cleaner has a brand new A5 convertible BTW.
Mrs Makrie is of German/Swiss extraction. The house is always both clean and tidy. As long as she is home. She has been away for a week and is not due back till Thursday night. If I stop making mess now then I may just have enough time to get it back into acceptable shape before her return.
Pretty bad but trying to get better.. I work away a bit, so t'other half gets stuck with looking after the horses and dogs on her own when I'm not there. When I'm around I'd rather be riding than tidying and cleaning so it tends to only happen if either of us gets really fed up and goes on a rampage with binbags and a duster.
In an untidy phase of life. With us it's stage of life, amount of kit and size of place. Have been super tidy, both ex-services and cluttered/untidy. Last place was considerably larger and really well organised and tidy. Here is much smaller so there is stuff everywhere.
Two active children, lots of animals, books (thousands), cds/dvds (hundreds), bikes (everyone has two, some more : ) boats, tools, and stuff. Examples: At a last count there were plus twenty helmets: horse riding, road, mtb, DH, motorbike open and full, kayak, climbing, racing - with at least two people doing each of these. I
know we own well over a hundred wheels on and off kit... and there are more tyres than wheels!!
Our two young ones are now in their twenties (just), one is buying a house, the other just started to rent a flat so we are starting to plan an organised and tidy house but reckon it will take us a year or two.
Mine fluctuates depending on how much -
1)Time I've been working away from home - the babysitter is great and stays over but he's not a cleaner.
2) Money the kids want to earn - I am trying to get them to want to earn rather than insisting they do jobs atm. If they don't do jobs they don't get funds
3)how many of the kids are at home - 2 here permanently, 1 is visiting for a week before he jets of to the states for 3 months. But nothing compares to my daughter coming home - she always arrives with loads of bags and a partner
4)How much I care - sometimes I feel physically rubbish and can happily ignore the chaos, but then I feel better and blitz the place
Joy's of single motherhood - I really should just get a cleaner. However it will always be a small house with a lot of stuff in it
My living room has 8 big squares of paint samples on one wall, they're 20 years old now - never did get the motivation to actually paint the room.
Also in the busy "kids and life" category so usually in a relatively untidy state.
However, as KJ02 is starting school next week we have a Teacher visit on Thursday, so Mrs K has been busy and we are now at showroom standard.
It won't last.
The house is well maintained and if we marketed it tomorrow I could honestly say that there isn't anything that doesn't work properly. I'm as fussy as hell about maintaining plumbing, electrics, fixtures and fittings because I DO have the time to fix them and I hate it when people whine that they are too busy. I guess I'm lucky that I can do plumbing, simple electrics and structural repairs and maintenance like cleaning out drains and gutters.
Mrs Gti and I also hate clutter so apart from pictures on the walls there are almost no nick-nacks or ornaments. All the kitchen work surfaces are clear, nothing is left out. The only messy room is the tiny box room she uses as an office, which is full of her late Mum's bits and pieces that she can't bring herself to throw away.
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Pretty tidy tbh, not obsessive or anything, but I don't really like stewing in a mess.
Was actually one of the reasons we sold a 4 bedroom house at the edge of town, to move to a 2 bed in a nicer area, less rooms to horde shite and hoover/dust/decorate etc. A few house moves saw us get rid of aforementioned shite as well, I don't have anything in my loft, think I've only been in there once in 7 years we've lived there.
My house is a disaster most of the week, then it usually gets tidied on a friday because we have people over at the weekend and we're ashamed of how we live 😀
I think the main problem is we have quite a lot of generic clutter (mainly, we have far too many kids toys to fit in our storage), this means that leaving for example a bowl on the floor doesn't get noticed. Then a glass next to it. Then a crisps wrapper. Then a saucer... Before you know it, entire house is a shit tip much like ocrider's gif above 🙂
If it can all be tidied on a Friday, it can't have been a disaster to begin with!My house is a disaster most of the week, then it usually gets tidied on a friday because we have people over at the weekend and we're ashamed of how we live
See at @ScaredyPants above who has made me feel just a little bit better about my own mess levels this morning 😀
Worst thing in mine is all the clothes draped over the landing bannister cos I can't be arsed to put them away. It's my house though, so I'd need a 3rd party to tell me if it's actually tidy or not. I did vacuum some areas of carpet the other day.
I don't live in a house as it were but it can get ****ing messy at times. Especially when my head goes.
In 2003 I lost the plot completely and throughout the winter months I run my stove 24/7 - a bloody massive glowing hell of burning mass in which I would just open the door and squeeze in another block of kiln dried slab from the local furniture/wood place. Friends were instructed they would not gain entry unless they turned up with a bag if this hot burning stuff so I had massive stock.
I didn't really clean the stove in any way and eventually a pile of ash developed in front of the thing. It was nicknamed Vesuvius for obvious reasons.
I'm not as bad as that these days but it ain't tidy by any stretch.
Before you know it, entire house is a shit tip much like ocrider's gif above
Just thank your lucky stars that you don't have Redthunder's loo 😀
I feel your pain. We have finally trained our daughter to put her clutter underneath the stairs and no longer at the foot of them. We had a few too many close shaves with wheeled objects...
Crockery, on the other hand is an ongoing project
Not really, I can't think of a time that the whole house would be tidy, but it's a constant battle between Wife and Children.
This
Remarkable how many full on mother / son battles start with a stray plate or crisp packet
Bike storage and all that goes with it is beautiful though!
I'm tidy.
Mrs North isn't.
Miss North is even worse.
It's clean - 3 hours of cleaners once a week (thinking of adding a second visit) - but I feel like I spend too much of my weekend just getting the place straight.
I'm on the brink of going [url= https://www.professionaladviser.com/ifaonline/news/2291908/author-reveals-fred-goodwins-obsession-with-filing-cabinets ]full Fred Goodwin[/url] about stuff piled up on any horizontal surface.
The sooner we renovate this house, the better.
Erm, I fold all of my clothes according to [url= https://konmari.com/ ]the KonMari method[/url], and forks and spoons get nested in the cutlery drawer.
Sadly, my wife and kids are less tidy.