to think that you can either have a clean, tidy and uncluttered house OR happy children but not both?

[GreenTeapot]

Or can you manage both? How do you do it?

I think once your house is clean and tidy (clutter-free) then it becomes easy and very quick to keep it that way and hosuework then takes very little time. But friends of mine live in very untidy houses and I can see that it must take ages to bring it to some kind of order and so they just can't be bothered. Fair enough.

And I was brought up in a dirty untidy house. I hated it as a child. I remember age 7 trying to clean the coffee table because I hated all the sticky dried in liquids on it. So some children do notice dirty/messy houses.

Crikey LeQueen, if I had room for all that I'd be sorted! No playroom here, one teeny bedroom with room for a single bed and a cotbed, and lots of boxes of toys. The kitchen table is usually clear-ish because we eat there so if we're doing playdough/painting/stamping whatever it happens there. As for the plastic bag every few days - I do that every damn night and somehow all the tat mysteriously reappears daily!

Point taken though - I'll keep playing the lottery and hold out for a bigger house with more shelves

Well I have a clean and tidy house without behaving as Cattleprod suggests. Children can play, drop crumbs and eat chocolate in the living room, but it all gets tidied up at the end of the day and spillages get wiped up as they happen. My girls are 12, 7 and 4 so not babies but seem to make as much mess now as they ever did... I work part time which helps, and DH is away a lot which is a mixed blessing - less mess but no help!

Luckily our house has lots of built in wardrobes, 2 in DD3s room so all the toys are in one big deep cupboard and I have lots of those plastic boxes from The Range to fling stuff into and stack them in the cupboard. Bookshelves for books and a big tub for dressing up stuff.

The kids can go gonzo all day with toys/books/colouring/dressing up/whatever, but before bathtime have to help me tidy up. Whilst they're in the bath I might clean the shower/loo, or put washing away.

I declutter regularly and am fairly brutal about chucking/recycling stuff that is broken, pens that have dried out etc.

I clean upstairs when they're at school/nursery, and run through downstairs when they're in bed. I hoover downstairs daily (it only takes 10 minutes to do once they're in bed) and wipe/dust. The kitchen is done as I go along (a dishwasher helps, I fill it throughout the day and put it on as I go to bed) and I'm quite averse to clutter and knick-knacks so not too much to dust (just lots of books on shelves!)

I find that the more you can keep on top of it, the easier it is and the less time it takes. Having 3 kids, 1 who is disabled, and raising them alone a lot because DH is away, and working myself means I just have to be really organised or I'd go stark raving bonkers and none of us would ever have any clean clothes or toothpaste!

Lists are your friend and never leave stuff out when it could be put away somewhere. Have a box or filing cabinet for paperwork and deal with it ASAP, clean the shower whilst your in it on a Saturday morning, do the ironing when kids are in bed (futile trying to do it when they're around) and empty school bags and lunchboxes as soon as they get in.

My girls certainly seem happy enough and are hardly confined to one toy at a time, they just know that at some point before bedtime they will be expected to help me clean it all up!

My daughter must be really happy!

YABU.. If you're organised and have everything where it shuld be to start with then it doesn't take long to tidy up at the end of the day. I spend less than half an hour a day sorting out the house, little and often and it's fine!

The thing is, with a baby and a pre-schooler and one or both of us working most of the time there really isn't much time to do all this tidying and storing stuff without leaving them to their own devices for at least short periods. Which is fine but they use the time to create havoc in my nicely organised toy drawers

I never leave a room empty-handed but I think I need more hands ...

what lesley said

and training - my dc clear up after themselves without even thinking about it because they have been expected to since they were small

I have a nice home since I converted one of the bedrooms into a den. Now the kids have their own lounge to decimate at will (and tidy under protest) ...and I have a house I'm not ashamed of.

agree clean, yes. tidy, quite hard

So it seems I need to get rich and buy a bigger home. I live in a one bedroom flat, I'm a single Mum to a 9 month old, I have practically no storage and I have the messiest mother in the history of ever who comes round and creates a whirlwind of crap through my already messy flat. One day I'll get a house with more than four rooms and hire a cleaner and gardener. Then I'll be a perfect mother!

I've seen one bedroom flats that are bigger than my house. Create storage, aswell. Everything needs to have a place, if it doesn't have a place it has to go.

Also, tidying is boring. My small amount of free time is much better spent eating biscuits and mumsnetting.

If I had a spare room/play room/den though my house would look bloody fantastic.

Mine is clean because I have a cleaner. Hate housework, don't care enough about it to do it myself but like a nice house so I pay someone to do it for me. I'm meticulous about the kitchen, food prep areas and all that, and DS has to tidy up toys from the living room at night but that's more about reclaiming an adult space than anything else. YANBU - it's your time, spend it how it makes you happy, and by that logic other posters who are happy to spend time cleaning and tidying are NBU either.

Agreed it all comes down to storage and space. I have very little storage, when I lived somewhere with big built in wardrobes, it was brilliant and the place always looked tidy.

But you do have to make your choices, I let my children play in every room, including making tents/dens/taking piles of toys into my bedroom/all over the house, it is chaotic and wouldn't suit others, but I have never been a fan of the playroom approach, I once used to nanny for a little boy who had a bedroom and a playroom, and his parents wouldn't even put a picture of his on the fridge, it's like there was no evidence of him in the rest of the house. The house was perfect for dinner parties though. That's one extreme, I am at the other, I guess you make your choice and live with the mess/or not.

YABU - of course you can. And bloody hell there are some smug sods on here - 'Iwould rather be having fun playing with my children than cleaning' and 'feel sorry for those living in dull beige houses'.

Living in a slobby shit tip doesn't mean you are a better parent than those who spend x amount of time cleaning. Children of messy women are not necessarily happier than children of neat freaks.

It is like that ghaslty kitchen magnet 'only dull people have clean houses'. Perhaps I should market a rejoiner 'on lazy women have dirty houses'.

I am Monica Geller re cleaning and my daughter is perfectly happy.

You don't need a big house - although it might make it easier. But you do need for everything to have a place to go. When I first got together with my OHG we lived in a bedsit and didn't have enough drawers, etc for things such as clothes. So we ended up having plies of clothing neatly stacked on the floor.

But once we moved into a small flat we had the space to put everything away that shouldn't be on worksurfaces or on top of furniture. As long as you have this, you can be very tidy in a small space.

When I lived in flats I had a wendy house in my sitting room for dd's stuff (when she was young). All her toys and crap went in there. As we got older it progessed to wicker baskets full of her stuff, and eventually playrooms etc. So that deals with the clyutter aspect.

Plus, get your children to help you clean. If you have a smidge of imagination you can make mopping the floor/cleaning the bath 'fun'. Plus children should take a share of the chores anyway, it will pay dividends when they grow up and leave home.

Some people are seriously wrong in thinking that people are more comfortable in their tidy house. Everyone is different. I can not stand going to a perfectly clean house. Talk about feeling stiff and like you can't move.

On the other hand DS (only 2) is happy but I can see he prefers a clean house. He is even more giddy when it's clean. So not sure I agree with OP.

All, agreed!

There are 6 of us (and all the other creatures!) in a minuscule house and after years of your approach I'm trying another way.

Compartmentalising (though not to the extent you describe) has created much more harmony for us. I've been able to start dressmaking again because I can risk setting up my machines downstairs without risk to the liluns, for eg. ...and places to find peace or alone time with me, are valuable each of my children occasionally

I agree GetOrf - and I think LeQueen and I have had this conversation on threads like this before.

I resent the implication that because I like to live in a clean and tidy house I am boring, dull, soulless and live in a bland beige box where friends must take their shoes off and can't finish a cup of tea before I whisk the mug away for bleaching. And where my children are neglected in order that I can scrub the grouting with a toothbrush

By keeping on top of the housework it means I can sit on MN with a cuppa and a piece of cake fruit without feeling guilty, or pressured to do housework because it's all done.

YABU

And as someone who has done a fair bit of bedsit living, I agree with everything Lesley has said

Also I think it helps to not have too much stuff around to begin with, I take a few minutes every month to go around the flat and put aside things we don't need anymore -- like, clothes or toys that DS has outgrown go in a bag for the charity shop, the paperwork for that thing that got sorted goes in the bin, that kind of thing.

Exactly sidge.

It is actually hugely insulting for the OP to think that children of those in clean houses have children who are unhappier than those who live in dirty ones.

Imagine if I wrote an OP: 'AIBU to think that children of lazy slatterns who live in cluttered dumps have unhappier children than those who live in clean and tidy houses'. I would be (rightly) flamed.