DH 'claimed' a room as his office and filled it with utter shit. AIBU to blitz it?

[Flingmoo]

We moved into a new house a year ago and we allocated one bedroom as our master bedroom, one as our baby's room, one as a guest room and the fourth one was going to be 'an office'. However, 'an office' became 'his office' as he literally stuck a sign with his name on the door.

From day 1 it's been full of boxes of his crap which I eventually persuaded him to unpack onto two IKEA Billy bookcases. Now 1 year down the line it is what I would refer to as a shithole. Think teenage boys bedroom mess multiplied by 10. Bearing in mind this is/was a lovely new build house.

The bookcases, are overflowing with junk.
The desk is piled with papers and dirty plates and cups.
The windowsill is lined with papers and dirty plates and cups.
The carpet is home to an overflowing bin, and is littered with papers, nik naks, and you guessed it, dirty plates and cups. Not much carpet visible actually.

It's a fire hazard as well as a horrible room to be in. I want to have a place to sit and work occasionally but I can't work in there because it's 'his' disgusting man cave of crap.

I offered to declutter and organise for him but he won't let me and gets quite angry at the suggestion, even when I promise not to actually throw away anything but just box the junk up for him to sort through at his convenience.

AIBU to completely blitz it (drastically declutter and organise the whole lot) when he's out one day and put all the junk in boxes for the garage, even though he's told me not to? I'd say the stuff needs to be reduced by about 80% for it to be a decent place to work in.

Shut the door on him and his door sign and leave him to it. At least it keeps his mess out of the rest of the house. Set up office space for you in the guest bedroom.

I disagree - he clearly needs a room to be his. Let him have it.

Then claim the guest room as your office - push bed to side (average stay overs people have in adulthood is about ten times a year - why give over an entire room to desk for the other 354 days?)

Make it all nice - chair, bookshelves, a divider from the bed - voila, gorgeous office for you.

What is it with men and their "offices"!?!? MY DH has done exactly the same - well, almost. He has taken over the small bedroom as an office, bought lovely ikea desks - plural! - and turned it into his man cave. But it's immaculate, all the paperwork filed and stored away, he dusts it regularly and there are no plates or cups left in there. He is a full time student and needed somewhere to study, so I thought this was helpful. However, I need somewhere for the household paperwork - bills, statements etc etc and I'm not allowed to keep them in there! So he goes nuts cause all the household paperwork is spread over the dining table but I keep pointing out to him, unless he let's me have some space in the office, they're bloody well staying there! And don't get me started on when I need to work from home - he almost cries when I have been i there and used the computer (OUR computer!) and spread my work papers over the desk!

That is exactly what my Dh did .
Our office soon became his office and he has the cheek to get annoyed when I want to use it.

Good grief, I would give him an ultimatum - either he makes the room in the house you both own presentable or you will do it for him and be indiscriminate about what you dispose of.

This is making me feel lucky. DH's office doesn't have dirty plates and cups in it.

Does he need an office? Do you want and need one just as much? Demand shared use of a mutually acceptable space, instigate a discussion on reallocating rooms or take over the spare room.

Why all these assumptions that men need or are most entitled to office space at home? Why why why? I don't understand that at all.

Dirty plates and cups? WTAF?

Tell him he has X amount of time to clean that mess up or you will hire someone to go in there and bin every fucking bit of it.

Dirty dishes and rubbish = insects and mice.

Just close the door & don't go in. Why make unnecessary work for yourself tidying some one else's mess?

Shut the door on him and his door sign and leave him to it. At least it keeps his mess out of the rest of the house. This has been my reasoning until now. But now I've realised I'd rather like a nice quiet serene place to work in ocassionally and it doesn't make sense not to share that room... Plus, I don't think he deserves the room anymore if he's just using it as a cesspit of crap... To be fair he does work from home once or twice a week, but I'd probably do that more often too if I had the luxury of a nice home office to work from!

In addition to the office of doom, he does already have a large heap of stuff in the garage and shed, as well as a massive bag of photography gear taking up the whole wardrobe of guest room. Meanwhile I have a couple of small boxes of 'nik naks' under our bed, two shelves of stationery in another room, and that's about it for personal stuff, everything else but clothing is shared stuff.

So I think at the moment he is definitely hogging more real estate than I am... I didn't fork out for an larger house so he could have a junk room...! We survived fine in a 2 bed flat with large attic before moving here... He always had a junked up desk in one corner but not an entire room.

FiftyShadesOfSporn I am SO planting cress now you've suggested it... Brill idea.

MrsNextDoor I reeeeeeeeeeeeally want to transform it into a lovely, flowery, cushiony, fabulous Pinterest-worthy office... If I manage to, I'll take before and after pics!

Not happy but I would acknowledge that if I inflict unreasonable living standards on my own family that they are reasonable in trying to address it.

Loving all the because it's dirty/ you both own the house so sure go right ahead and go against his wishes they don't mean a thing. Failing to forget that mentality essentially means logically anything the DH thinks is dirty or not how he likes it he should be able to do the same.

I admit it's disgusting but you can't go and just throw anything you like after all something that looks like crap to you could be important to him.

Essentially All those suggesting it obviously wouldn't care if their DHs did the same to them and they were expected to just be ok with it

I have a 'crap' shelf in the kitchen cupboard and a shed where all my gardening crap is. I'd be mad if my husband took it upon himself to clear it up. Absolutely hopping mad.

But I've deliberately contained the mess to those two areas that don't impinge on anyone else. If husband sat down and explained that he needed the space for something specific - then I'd gladly help him clean it up.

If its just because he's sick of the mess - then no.

I think you can definitely insist he clears away the cups & plates etc, that is a health hazard. It might require some more delicate negotiations to agree to share the office space so you can use it too.

Love the idea to do a Pinterest inspired Office, let us see the pictures if you do!

Another one here! No dirty cups etc but mounds of DH's clothes/paperwork/random shit. There is now a bike in there and the stand thing you use to cycle at home. On the bookshelves I have one section I have claimed. The other 10 or so I have given up on. Every couple of weeks I point out that our office is unuseable (for me!) and he does make an effort to clear it. However. The bike seems to have moved in. We are in a high rise apartment so no outdoor space but there is a storage 'room' that would take it if he put it in its box as promised.

He uses it a lot for work so I feel like I cannot complain too much. But my dream of the 'office' have long since flown.... Not sure what the answer is tbh. You have my sympathy.

I like the idea of using the room as a general dump for anything you want to hide until it fills up completely. If you have a cat l would suggest relocating the litter tray. Just a suggestion.

He's put his name on the door, has he?!

I'd be putting my name on the bedroom door

You definitely need to add your name onto the door and make sure that you pointed refer to it as OUR office every time you talk about it - and correct him every time he calls it his office!

Could you 'accidentally' knock something over that causes problems next time you are in there because he's left horrible stuff out? To show how dreadful it is...

Essentially All those suggesting it obviously wouldn't care if their DHs did the same to them and they were expected to just be ok with it

I do understand your concern as well as the other couple of posters who have said something along these lines. But I am not actually planning on throwing anything out, I would just be organising the good stuff in a logical way, and the stuff I consider "junk" will go in a box for him to decide. The idea is that if it turns out some of that trash is actually treasure according to him, he can find a tidy place for it in the freshly sorted office. And hopefully he'll either bin the majority or stick it in the garage or attic.

How would I feel if it was the other way round? A tad ashamed, but grateful that someone else will come and do all the hard work for me without actually binning anything! (In fact, I have been on he receiving end of this in the past as I am not naturally a neat and tidy person, in my teenage years my poor mum was always the one to point out my mess and sometimes step in to help declutter.)

My DH has his own study. Unfortunately he does work from home sometimes. However, I treat it as his bat cave and don't go in there - his room he sorts it!!

I would take a couple of pictures of the room. General clutter and grimy close ups shots.

Then place thise under the notice.
Sometimes thesr things jump out at you much more from a photo.

have just realised I have a room full of junk in my house and no dh

My suggestion would be to do it so slowly he won't notice so therefore he can't get annoyed with you.

Make no big deal about it, so don't announce your intention to sort it and "declutter". Just enter the cave, remove the cups and plates and then bin the obvious rubbish, that's actually real rubbish.

Next day do some more and so on, little by little it becomes a useful room again. He won't notice until its 40% done.

If he kicks off just calmly explain "I do need the cups and plates and I had to move things to find them my dearest silly billy husband, light of my life....what nice weather we have been having" etc etc.

I think a tidy and a sort out is important and necessary part of life unless you live in a Manor House with a vast, mysterious and spooky attic for keeping the heirlooms and treasure.

Buy a beautiful desk and a mediocre bed.

But the medicore bed in HIS bedroom/office. Put the beautiful desk in YOUR bedroom/slash office. (he can have vistation rights to your room between the hours of 9pm -7am, you can visit his when it's clean ).

I feel your pain. My DH too is prone to this sort of thing.

He does have a "study" upstairs which is his to do as he likes with, and it is a complete bombsite. Luckily no cups or dirty plates, he does bring those down for the dishwasher. His computer (up in the "study") stopped working quite a while ago, so it is now in pieces across the floor in there, along with random bits he has spent a fortune buying from Ebay (including a bamboo keyboard, I kid you not), with which he seems to think he can rebuild it into a super dooper machine. None of what he has bought and tried has worked yet, but so long as all of that shit stays enclosed in "his" room, I can ignore it. He had better not ever touch my desk/laptop!!

He is rather a hoarder and sometimes admits this. He simply cannot throw anything out "in case it is valuable or could be useful" and it is amazing what random, twisted piece of shite he seems to think could be essential at some point.

I must admit that I dreaded having to help him clear his mum's house after she died, not just because it is clearly a sensitive and sad task, but because he would simply have brought everything to our house and we would hardly have been able to move.

In the end it was the sale of the house that came to my rescue, so there was a deadline, which forced him to admit that the task would not be accomplished without the help of a proper house clearance team. I dread to think what might have happened otherwise.

I have no advice other than that you insist on the no dirty plates rule, and otherwise that he keeps his shit hoard to one room and closes the door. Hoarders can get very defensive if anyone else is seen to be tampering with their hoard, so you have to be careful.

My Dad was also a hoarder, but their house had several outhouses where he could store his crap, and it has never come into the house.