To be fascinated by tidy people

Ah I love kids though, honestly I wouldn’t be bothered, everything is wipeable 🙌

@Kitchenbattle . I once had coffee in a house like that. I had my toddler with me and it was an unnerving experience 😆.

@Dramatic @PassOnThat thank you for the laugh. I’ll take the comments as compliments 🙌🙌🙌

🤣🤣 this made me laugh

4 of us live here 🤣🤣 I just tidy after everything 😅

This doesn't even look like anyone lives there

@Kitchenbattle . I love your home, but to me that looks like a holiday let before my family have taken possession of it. 5 minutes later and it would look totally different 😂!

This just shows how tidiness can look so different to different people. I have a tiny home built in the early 1800s. Our decor is simple but traditional and fairly in keeping with the period. We have pictures on our walls and various things that we love on display.

But it’s still very minimal. Minimal and tidy rather than the more modern clean and sparse look. I think I would find the modern white style very unforgiving of the normal scruffiness and marks that occur with family life. That’s where I’m too lazy as I don’t like scrubbing and cleaning so owning as few things as possible and only what we truly need makes our home easy to clean and keep tidy.

@LoudPlumDog I shared pics of my home on my AMA. My house is always tidy. I can’t let it get messy, I just don’t have it in me 🤣 here’s a few pics.
I’m still looking for a rug for the sitting room…I’m too fussy 😅

Tricky one. Our home is tiny by house and it’s just enough space for us. We like it that way. We are very minimal and ruthless with our belongings. We don’t want for more and even if we lived in a bigger house we wouldn’t want more things to fill it. There are elements of well-chosen storage, but honestly I’d rather life clutter free than have the stress of how to organise too many things. We absolutely do own sentimental items and “unnecessary” things. Just not too many.

Lots of previous posters have reiterated the “everything having a place it belongs” advice but the reality is that sometimes you end up in a situation where you’re living somewhere very small, and a normal number of belongings won’t fit there. A small flat is fine for one person with modest belongings - add in a second or third person with a similar quantity and suddenly you’re a messy person despite your best efforts.

This is us imbrocator. Every piece of furniture is chosen with storage in mind.

We have boxes (functional sturdy ones to stack for bedrooms and pretty ones to go on top of things for other rooms). Almost every flat surface has a layer of boxes on it. Some windowsills and shelves are used for display of ornaments instead. The shelves are screwed to the wall, we did it ourselves and they can be removed, the holes filled in and painted over if we leave.

There's cube units and chests of drawers everywhere. These work better than large furniture when you're renting because you don't know the size and layout of the next place so larger furniture can be difficult to fit in. All furniture doubles as storage. The lid on the footstool/seat comes off and blankets go inside. The toy box is wooden and doubles as a seat in the bedroom. There's a day bed with a ton of cushions instead of a sofa, with drawers underneath to store all the bedding for the beds. The beds have boxes of out of season clothes stored underneath. Tables have a shelf underneath or drawers instead of legs.

Over-the-door hooks store coats and bags on hollow doors where proper hooks can't be installed, they're also easy to pack up on moving day. There's a shoe rack that goes halfway up the wall in the entrance. In the kitchen everything that doesn't go in a cupboard is hung on a wall. From the steps, broom and collapsible bucket, to the shopping bags, cups and saucepans. The cupboards are for food, plates, medicine and cleaning supplies.

We are not a minimalist household but everything is clean and tidy. Name almost any category of stuff and you'll find it lives in a box or drawer somewhere. The furniture is easy to clean between/behind so there's not a build up of dust or mouldy walls developing unnoticed. There's actually no damp problems here so no mouldy walls full stop, but sometimes we find we need to move furniture around from where we originally planned to put it, so a particular area has more airflow or can be more easily and frequently cleaned, if there's a damp problem with the property. This is easy to do with the type of furniture we have.

I used to be very messy, mess would just seem to appear and I'd have no idea how to keep it under control. It took years of training myself for my house to look reasonably tidy. It's not showhome perfect by any means but I could invite people back on most days and not be worried.

I got myself in to a routine of fully tidying/cleaning the kitchen before taking the kids to school, I found the kitchen was the biggest issue so once that's clean and tidy the rest doesn't seem so daunting, also because it's done every single morning it never gets too messy or dirty. I do have a dishwasher though which makes so much difference. I have certain surfaces that I refuse to put anything down on so they stay clear all the time. The dining table does get cluttered so I try and clear it every few days. I did get rid of lots of "stuff" when we moved house a few years ago and that helped massively.

@Imbrocator

From what I observe it seems like naturally tidy people either have houses which have a lot of space (and therefore a lot of room for storage), or very few belongings.

Not really. More important is having the right kind of storage solution for what little space you have. (And of course limiting yourself to how much stuff you buy - that doesn't mean doing without, it means decluttering and not keeping the stuff you'll never need/use again!). We've a couple of cupboards (one floor to ceiling and the other under the stairs) which OH fitted out with all kinds of shelves, hooks, etc. - not a square foot of wasted space and it's amazing how much you can fit in them. We're in them daily - nothing is in them that isn't used on a regular basis. We have a single wardrobe each and a single chest of drawers each for our clothes - that's not excessive and we have plenty of things to wear all year round - it's a good balance. When they start to look full, we have a clear out to the charity shop.

I find prioritisation a real issue. I literally don't know where to start a lot of the time. And I run out of time/energy if I try to do everything all at once. What has been helpful for me has been to stop trying to prioritise and just write everything that needs to be done down on a card (one card for each thing) so I don't forget about things and then work through the cards when I've got some energy to do something. I find it saves mental headspace as I'm not thinking "what should I do now?" or getting overwhelmed by everything I have to do.

Nail on the head. If you tidy as you go along, you're making better more efficient use of time. Eg instead of standing idly waiting for the kettle to boil, you could wipe the kitchen surface, do some washing up, put some kitchen stuff away, etc. By doing stuff constantly throughout the day, you don't need to spend a whole morning (or day) doing all your housework and "life admin" at the weekend or your day off. I do my ironing in the lounge watching TV. I do a quick wipe around the bathroom after showering waiting for my hair tongues to heat up.

And a huge yes to the amount of wasted time that someone with an untidy house would waste looking for stuff that they (or partner/children) couldn't find as it's got hidden/lost under something or behind something or they've simply forgotten where it was left. The old adage of "a place for everything and everything in it's place" is so true - it makes life so much easier for everyone to know where stuff "lives" - the problem is getting them into the habit of putting it in it's place when they come in and putting stuff back in it's place after use, but like all habits, the more they do it (the more you insist they do it), eventually they'll do it automatically!

A massive wake up call for me was my father's death. I was brought up in an untidy/chaotic household where nothing "had a place" and things were just left/abandoned all over the house. My father's job had a very early start so he always left for work before anyone else was awake. One morning we got a knock at the door from the police saying they'd found his body! Apparently, instead of taking the car to work that morning, he'd walked - or tried to, and had collapsed on the way with a heart attack. We have to assume he couldn't find the car keys - they didn't have a hook or dish to keep the car keys in the same place, so it was often a matter of hunting around the house to try to find them. That morning, he clearly couldn't find them and rather than waking the whole house, just decided to walk instead! We found the car keys in the pocket of his shorts that he'd worn the night before! That really brought it home to me about the importance of having "homes" for things, and ever since, I've been paranoid about "a place for everything and everything in it's place" and have successfully trained my OH and son to comply in our family home. I can't remember the last time any of us lost anything!

Having a time limit on things doesn't work for me either, mainly because there are things that I might not use/look for for over a year but still want. I find it a weird, arbitrary thing, even though I do understand the idea behind it. For sentimental items, the advice in all the methods which have helped me is to "build up" your decluttering muscle/skill by working on easier things first and leave the sentimental items until you're much more confident. Sorting through clothes, or books, or tools or board games or whatever is much easier than trying to make decisions which make you feel guilty. And if an item in an "easy" category is making you feel sentimental, then reclassifying that item not as a book/t-shirt/cooking pot, but as a piece of sentimental memorabilia, helps avoid stalling. And means I can move it from the wardrobe, bookcase or kitchen (if I don't actually use it) to the sentimental items wardrobe!

I would recommend Dana K White's podcast A Slob Comes Clean - just start listening at any point. The latest episode, the first, a random title which catches your eye. I do like her "container concept" which is sort of related - it's about letting the amount of space dictate the amount of stuff to keep and prioritising within those boundaries - it makes sense if you listen to her ramble about it for a while (and she is quite rambly!)

Then I liked the idea which might have been from Marie Kondo, to make the most of sentimental items by finding a way to display or use them so you can actually enjoy them regularly. That made me start to use my grandma's plates rather than saving them "for best". But it might also be something like - I never use that cooking pot, because it's rusty and I think it might put toxins in our food - but I like the colour, and it reminds me of my other grandma, so I could drill holes in it, remove the handle and repurpose it as a planter.

From what I observe it seems like naturally tidy people either have houses which have a lot of space (and therefore a lot of room for storage), or very few belongings.

Lots of previous posters have reiterated the “everything having a place it belongs” advice but the reality is that sometimes you end up in a situation where you’re living somewhere very small, and a normal number of belongings won’t fit there. A small flat is fine for one person with modest belongings - add in a second or third person with a similar quantity and suddenly you’re a messy person despite your best efforts.

I’d be more curious to know how others deal with this sort of issue. Do you just live with the clutter? Are you absolutely ruthless with beautiful/valuable/sentimental belongings which you know you’d want to keep if you lived somewhere larger?

I know someone who used to put things they weren’t sure about in a cupboard for a year, and if they hadn’t looked at them in that time they got rid of them, but I find it impossible to be that ruthless, especially with sentimental belongings from people who I cherish or have passed away.

Some people genuinely do struggle to visualise the end result, and looking at images of other people's tidy houses is unlikely to help. It's one of the tips that goes around ADHD spaces - when you do get your space to a place that you like (whether someone helps you with that or not) take a photo of it. Or if you're parent to an ADHD child, help them tidy their room/bag/desk/etc and then take a photo to print for them to refer back to.

I can't tell if that's an issue I have or not - I have quite good visual imagination, so I can look at a space for example and imagine a wall painted a different colour, or a different-sized piece of furniture there. I can see that if I've lived with a messy space for a while, it's difficult to picture that space any differently. I do think if you're used to a space being clean, it's easier to spot what's out of place and sort it, rather than being used to it being a mess and then just adding to the mess because you don't know where to start with sorting it.

Are you saying that some people don't know what tidy looks like?

Just google tidy room images.

My house is tidy, not clinically tidy as we have photos, pictures, plants, books, CDs and DVDs (yes, I know). But everything is in or on bookshelves and cupboards and there is nothing strewn over the floor or furniture.

What spaces would you like to see?

Does anyone want to share a pic of a tidy space of theirs? Nothing identifiable of course, but visual is always much more helpful than written.

I love this, and I agree. It's why I love MN (most of the time ❤️)

We are naturally untidy. Not dirty though. Doom piles of letters, chargers un plugged and go in a supermarket carrier bag next to the sofa. Wash up always after meals, bins out, laundry on most days, kitchen and bathroom cleaned properly every week and spruced as we go.

Biggest game changer is getting rid of stuff. So the doom piles get smaller. We have become militant on this. Every school holiday we do a bit of a declutter and deep clean. You can get away with running the hoover round etc in the meantime.

The mess all over the house gets easier as they get older- don't need highchairs or buggies. But then you have the whole teenager bedroom thing 🙃

Ahh, I'll bite 😆

Let's take making a sandwich.

Getting out the spray and the cloth. Wiping down the worktop. Wiping the door/window/fridge/freezer/microwave handles. Wiping down the windowsill and tops of fridge and microwave. Sweeping and mopping the floor. THAT is cleaning. I do it weekly. Not when I've made a sandwich.

Grabbing the dish sponge, dampening it momentarily under the tap, swiping up most of the sandwich crumbs with it, shaking it into the sink for all of two seconds and leaving those crumbs there, before putting the sponge back between the taps with some crumbs still attached...that is not cleaning. That is part of the task of making a sandwich and it takes less than 10 seconds.

You know what else I don't do? I don't get out a bread knife, a butter knife, a cheese knife, a chopping board. I get out a dinner plate and an ordinary knife (think it's called a steak knife, the serrated ones we eat dinner with). I hack off two slices of bread with it and some wedges of cheese, then use the same knife to wonkily scrape some butter over the bread and 😱 dip the same knife into the chutney inevitably leaving the odd butter streak behind (which kills nobody, so who cares). Meaning 99.9% of the crumbs created are on the plate with the sandwich and I rarely have to wipe any up.

When I've finished eating there's one plate and one knife to add to the stack of dishes beside the sink for me to wash before bed (my preference to do it this way) and maybe occasionally a few rogue crumbs on the worktop that will get dealt with during the weekly cleaning, if they're not swiped up with that damp sponge again after the washing up since I have it in my hand.

Work smarter, not harder.

With her parents it's entirely possible. Maybe it's genetic 😅. Or tidying is just really boring when you're 3! She's a stickler for putting rubbish in the bin though - she's constantly picking up random bits of packaging that people have dropped outside and carrying them until we pass a bin. That's definitely my doing - I absolutely hate littering! At home if she unwraps a sweet or finishes a carton of juice it's 50/50 whether she hands me the rubbish or wants to take it to the bin herself, but she absolutely doesn't throw it on the floor.