To think people with pristine houses are weird

[JJ17]

I try, the house is OKish, my rules being "would social services take my kids away". But there are certain sticky bits on the carpet.

The loo seat doesn't fit right and most of the wallpaper is scribbled on.

Am I alone in this?

I watch reality TV and most peoples' houses are more decorated than mine.

I can afford to do 1 or 2 rooms a year therefore the rest are for shit most of the time.

I can't stand a load of mess around. It just makes me fill miserable and unsettled (my mother would laugh if she could read this because my bedroom was always a tip when I lived at home).

However, each to their own, as long as a house isn't actually dirty.

I don't buy into the theory though that a messy house is more homey and cosy and 'look what a happy, jumbly, chaotic family we are'.
It's just a messy, untidy house.

i love to keep my house spotless. i am very proud of it but i think my friends sometimes think i am ocd

also, i dont like sitting in other people's messy, dirty houses, there is no need for it, it doesnt take long to tidy and clean to a basic level.

For the people with the dusty books, we too have a house full of books.

I have a Henry cleaner and it comes with brush attachment which is fab at getting the worse of the dust of the shelves and the books quickly.

If you could see my house you would be surprised I'm giving out house keeping tips .

my fiance has several hundred books (in fact probably more) and we've moved from a large to a small place. The books are taking over and they are dust magnets. We only have one room to relax in (though half of that's also his office) so, it's all books. However...i can see his point (to an extent) about books being old friends ...i agree but i'm more practical and due to space had to cull most of mine
but it would be wrong to bully him into doing same.
Anyway...i digress. I feel a home should be a home / lived in, and not a show room. I always feel ill at ease if invited to a perfect home where i'm asked to remove shoes at the door etc as one of my friends does. I'm scared to even breathe! Family friends have a 'showhouse' , are very OCD and their son has grown up to take that to extremes...got his own place and in his 30s but never had a girlfriend as admits, doesn't want the worry of anyone messing his home/sharing his space. Has to have a clean white freshly laundered towel EVERY single day. Won't invite anyone round. How sad and restricting to live like that.

I don't think they are weird at all, I would love a pristine and neat and tidy house but am just to lazy pregnant to achieve it. I think it's all about the level of mess you can cope with, my mess tolerance is incredibly low at the moment.

Things which really drive me mad are stuff on top of wardrobes and under beds, keys and bus tickets on mantels, piles of paperwork AAAAh!!!

I took 250 books to the charity shop in the summer, and still have 500.
I actually dust mine and look at them arranged in author groups and height of book.

I like to keep a clean house, it can get untidy by the time dd goes to bed, but when dh is getting her settled I whizz about, or vice versa. I hate a dirty house and don't like visiting dirty houses either. My MIL and SIL's houses are total health hazards and a disgrace. It is unadulterated filth. SIL's toilet practically made me heave recently - no joke! I just can't understand how anyone can leave it to get that bad. I know they think I am anal and the judge me for being a sahm (sil's career apparently prevents her from becoming familiar with a toilet brush) but you know what? Our house is clean, warm, cozy and very comfortable - all the things dh grew up without due to his mums lack of care in the house. It makes him SO happy that our dd is not growing up in the same conditions.

I LOVE to sit having a coffee whilst looking at my lovely clean kitchen. It is not bare or devoid of any family charm whatsoever (we live in a house over 200yrs old) but it is a lovely place to spend time & we have lots of visitors. I like that I am usually not scrummaging about trying to hide stuff if someone comes unexepectedly to the door.

My friend is immaculate even her drawers are allco-ordinated .....her sewing box has a needle threaded resdy in each bobbin and I cant imagine shes ever had a lost sock.

I deliberately cause mayhen in there .

Ummm...I started decorating my front room in June... I'm nearly there, got half the chimney breast done!! ...and just for the record, I really do wonder if SC would take way my ds's if they saw their bedroom, then again at 14 and 17 figure that they're old enough to reconise that's it's a sty.

I would LOVE and aspire to have a clean and tidy and modern house, in fact I'd settle for all the light-bulbs working (I've very low standards ...but I'm just not wired that way!

Like a couple others on here I grew up in a messy dirty horrible house full of clutter. I thought this was normal for so long until I was a teenager and I was too embarrassed to bring any friends round . I never want my children to feel like that when they are older!

My parents house is still the same now and I laugh about it when I go round there now but it does make me boak as well! And when my children have been at crawling stage I've often whipped the Hoover out as soon as I've got round there! They have so much clutter, you can't see a single surface. And most of it could go in the bin. For example, one random item - a dirty dusty old jar full of old pens that don't work and other random things like buttons that don't belong to anything. It's horrible but, hey, I don't live there now!

I wish my house was perfect but with a 5yo, 3yo and 3 month old it's practically impossible! My house is so so but sometimes it does all get on top of me. Never would be as bad as my parents though!

Saying that I really don't care what anyone elses house is like. I think I'm less judgemental about it as I grew up in such a messy place but it does make me like being tidy and clean now myself though.

When I had a two bed flat, it was always immaculate, when I had (and then we) a three bed house it was pretty well presented and immaculately clean. When we moved and the DC came along it has been an uphill struggle. I have concluded that to keep a big house like a show home you have to be very very rich. Vast quantities of furniture (ours is inherited or 2nd hand) and a cleaner thrice a week would do it for me. It's all relative I think. It was fine when we had an au-pair. Now she's gone 3 housr from the cleaner and probably another 12 a week from me - is not enough to keep it all tip top. I work full time btw and DH works abroad and only home Fri-Mon.

i grew up in a pig sty,my mother never cleaned,and now there is black mould all over the walls as they never open the windows.she hoards anything she can.it is utter filth.i used to clean the house as soon as i was old enough to hold a hoover.i try to avoid going there...
(eg there is a hole in the kitchen ceiling that has been there for 5 years theyve put some tarpalin over it,so thats ok )

my house is clean.
i never hoard.
but it is quite untidy
and i prefer to leave the washing up to dp

My HV said she that over tidy houses with small children in them always made her worry.

I also had a tutor in for a few weeks to help DS . She said to me that she liked visiting our house becaue it was lived in and dcs were getting attention. Most of the houses she visited that were immaculate usually were so at the expense of the children, which is why they needed a tutor!

"My HV said she that over tidy houses with small children in them always made her worry."
So did my midwife.

Given that I grew up in such squalor it is pretty astonishing that I am not OCD about keeping the house clean and tidy. I give the house a good going over once a week - hoovering and dusting and cleaning loos/bathrooms, and just put DD's stuff away every night.

I can't get over the poster who paints her house every year. I have a huge living room, dining room, study, downstairs loo, hall/stairs/landing, 4 bedrooms and a bathroom to paint. There is no way I would do that every year. I find that I don't need to decorate every year as we don't have an open fire and neither of us smokes.

"My HV said she that over tidy houses with small children in them always made her worry."

thats ridiculous!!!

if your bookshelves have glass doors you never rarely need to dust them.

I am very house proud and don't see a problem with it - I certainly don't think you are being reasonable to call people with pristine houses 'weird'. Others (i.e. me) might think it's 'weird' to go to people's houses and they be unclean - particularly toilets etc. I also love to have people round and I'm proud of my house when I do.

Despite our house being very tidy though it still doesn't live up to the 'mum' standard. She does things like wash skirting boards weekly....

I really hate the view that having a clean and tidy house somehow means you are neglecting your children in some way. My house looks like a bomb has hit it right now but I have given DD the same amount of love and attention she gets every day, which is quite a lot.

Weird to have a pristine/ clean house? Depends on your definition of pristine I guess. I would think most people who visit my house would think it was pristine for someone with 2 young DC's.

I simply think it is lovely to live in a clean house and show my DC's day in day how you respect property and nice things. They can play, make mess and have fun, but at the end of the day - the toys go back where they live. The craft stuff stays in the kitchen.

Living in a messy house, forget weird, smacks of absolute laziness. It takes time and energy to get a house to a stage where storage etc is sorted but once you put that time in, it is pretty easy to keep on top of things.

Oh and yes, I decorate a couple of rooms each year...how else do you keep your house fresh?

It does make me raise my eyebrows when people take the higher ground because their house is a cluttered home full of joy, books and stuff. Like if its tidy and has good storage its somehow lowbrow and not a good home.

Overdisplay of books amongst the "look how intelligent I am and how many well thought of and varied books I read" crowd really makes me seethe. Its just another form of intellectual snobbery, which is my pet hate.

I like clean and tidy and well-decorated

Colour me weird

"I am always embarrassed and hate having people to my home."

I don't understand why you think people with clean houses are weird, when you aren't happy with your home being a mess?

I think there's a big difference between being happy in your home on your own as a family, and the thought of some sneery dusthating busybody popping in unannounced.

My house is immaculate and organised, it always seems that people with messy disorganised houses are doing more work, they just mess it up quicker.

We are all disciplined and put things away rather than leaving them lying around.

when I was a child my DM never did anything and the house was an embarrassment, I would come home from school aged 8 and start cleaning up the lunch things she had left.

Housework did become a bit of an obsession but I think MN has made me cut down a bit.