To think it is easy to keep your home clean?

[Ohwell14]

Providing you are able bodied obviously

Are you high?

My house is immaculate 24 hours a day.
And before you think I spend my life cleaning I don't. My husband left a year ago and I live alone with a female lodger who is hardly ever at home.
I only realised when my husband left what an utter slob he was. i work 40 hours a week and he did absolutely nothing except make chaos, I used to spend the entire weekend and all my holidays clearing up his shit.
Now I come home and relax. I have a quick hoover round on Sunday mornings and clean the bathrooms and that's it - tidy all the time.
I'm not living with a man again, it was the same with my first husband and two boyfriends, I am not a bloody servant.

Messy house is a sign of creative minds....2 dc, dh, 2 shedding dogs, cats, chronic disease, old cumbersome home. Why would I compare myself to anyone? Superior cleaning skills are not how I am going to waste what little bit of energy in my poor old body....virtually everything else is more fun. Clean kitchen, bathrooms, made my own bed (fear of spiders and I may want to nap in a bit), I cook most meals from scratch. Healthy food and healthy recipes are more important than the state of the kitchen floor.

I find myself agreeing with you Abbylee, but then in the back of my mind a voice said 'could they get a handheld Hoover and have one child Hoover the kitchen floor edges while the other swiffers behind, before they wash their hands for tea?' Just a suggestion. Certainly if you have no energy left it sounds like you do enough

My house is not immaculate my any stretch of the imagination but it's pretty clean and tidy. The worst bit is keeping on top of what seems like hundreds of daily tasks - the washing, hoovering, washing-up, drying, putting away...etc etc, while cooking, entertaining the kids, walking the dogs, etc etc ad infinitum.

Saturday or Sunday afternoon I tend to have a blitz of the cleaning - get everything done. Then it's just keeping my head above water with the day-on-day stuff.

Sigh.

IrritatedUser1960

My home would be immaculate if I lived alone too.

With children, it's a completely different story.

I'd say it's easy to keep it clean, less easy to keep it tidy with kids (and a man ) It doesn't take too much time or effort to just keep on top of things and keep it basically clean. During the holidays ours is clean but messier than usual because I'm spending my time with my child, but when she's at school I find it much easier. I get it all organised and spotless during school hours and prepare what I can of the dinner in advance and the evenings are much simpler and easier to keep on top of everything. I find once I've got everything organised and clean and tidy it's much easier to keep it that way. It also gets so much easier as your children get bigger xx

Messy house is a sign of creative minds...

my friend is a very successful interior designer. Some of her creations are mind blowing. Her house is immaculate.

I'm a designer and my home is a dump!

Which just goes to show that the saying is a load of old tosh fekko.

Why can't you be "creative" without living with the detritus of your creativity all around you? It's just an excuse. My house is rarely completely tidy, but I don't feel superior to tidier people because it's a sign of my creativity versus they're bland boringness (if there is such a word).

I'm basically just lazier. And so are the rest of you

I do think I'm more creative because I have more energy for creativity due to not being that fussed if everything's a bit of a muddle (I mean the thought and energy I'd spend trying to stay on top of it all the time can be used in more creative endeavours).

That might be complete nonsense but it's definitely not an excuse. I don't need to excuse my choices to anybody

Anyway off to carve a particularly creative pumpkin while my kids trash the living room

I don’t think being tidy stifles my creativity at all. I’ve just carved a spectacular unicorn pumpkin in a spotless kitchen

Ooh, show us the unicorn pumpkin? Please??

I would attach a pic but I imagine I’ll get all sorts of stick for my use of the word ‘spectacular’ and comment about how if I cleaned less my unicorn would be much better

Making a virtue of messiness is just a backlash against the long held equation of cleanliness with moral superiority (which is still implicit to this day and you see its imprint on this thread).

Neither hold any water. They're just different forms of one up man ship.

My house was extremely tidy when I lived alone and worked full time. This was before DH moved in and before we had small children. Now it's far more untidy 'lived in'. It wouldn't annoy me so much if they left my stuff where I put it. TBH they are used to me by now so they don't leave so much mess.

Ollivander84 😻I know that problem....my two cats have a toy box in the living room, if I put a favourite toy away they will go and get it out again 😂.

I think it depends what you do in your home.

My house was spotless yesterday. I could've kept it that way easily. But I didn't. I let the children throw a Halloween party. The party was in the dining room but it spread along with the mess it made.

There is a plate of cold sausage rolls and crumbs all over the living room. There's a half eaten pizza in my room, confetti in the bathroom, the kitchen sink is full of washing up to be done and I daren't even look in the child's room. The dining room is quite tidy because there were too many sausage roll crumbs and bits of confetti for my comfort so I cleaned it a few minutes ago.

I'd rather spend my time with family than worrying about the state of my house.

I think it's easy to keep your home tidy - if you're the tidy type and either live alone or with others who are equally tidy (or well-trained). But keeping it clean - then you need to live alone, be tidy and have no pets. I used to have a spotless show home. Now I have a tidy but not spotless home & pets - youngest cat leaves food on the windowsill (and up the blind) because he's a messy eater, all leave mucky pawprints (despite Turtlemat at back door), hair gets shed everywhere 2 seconds after hoovering... I clean regularly & very thoroughly but I'd swear the cats follow me around to destroy everything I do as soon as I leave the room.
It all depends on your circumstances.

There is a plate of cold sausage rolls and crumbs all over the living room. There's a half eaten pizza in my room, confetti in the bathroom, the kitchen sink is full of washing up to be done and I daren't even look in the child's room. The dining room is quite tidy because there were too many sausage roll crumbs and bits of confetti for my comfort so I cleaned it a few minutes ago.
How can you live like that?! I'd have eaten the pizza for breakfast hours ago and snaffled the sausage rolls for elevenses Prioritise!!!

Well it depends on your circumstances doesn't it? When both me and OH had no kids and worked full time it was easy to keep a clean and tidy house, and we've got a decent sized four bed with three bathrooms. We were both out of it 50 + hours a week, only needed to hoover and do 2/3 loads of washing a week and tidied up cooking or bathroom mess etc as we made it. We had time.

It is also relatively easy for me to keep a clean and tidy house now I'm a SAHM to one 19 month who naps at home 3 hours every day^^ and goes to bed at a decent hour. He finds the hoover hilarious, joins in with dusting (doesn't actually do any of course but loves waving his own duster at the surfaces) and the rest I can keep on top of while he naps or is in bed.

Was it easy (or even really do-able) when DS was under a year old? No. No, no, no. I had a velcro reflux baby who would only dreamfeed and sleep on me who also needed medication 6x a day. I also expressed milk for the first 6m which was hard going and took a lot of time. I was pleased most days if I managed to get showered, dry and dressed and have my shit together enough to leave the house for a few hours here and there to stop me losing my mind with cabin fever. Fuck prioritising housework in those circumstances,
I'm not wonderwoman. OH was bloody delighted on the days when he got home from work and I'd managed to squeeze in cooking us a proper dinner around everything else I was juggling. Other days we had a thoroughly messy house and freezer tapas or tinned soup for dinner before falling into bedsheets that were 2-3 weeks old. You can only do what you can do!

Don't judge people who have less than perfect houses. You don't know what they're dealing with. We always made sure our hygiene basics were covered (clean kitchen and toilets etc) and that all baby related paraphernalia was clean but other than that I really couldn't have given a shit about bits on my carpet or dust everywhere.

Some people work better in a tidy environment. Some people resent tidying and so work better if they haven't just expended energy doing something they resent. Some people enjoy tidying and enjoy being in a tidy space. Some people don't pay much attention to whether things are tidy or not.

I imagine most of us are somewhere in the middle on most of this. I just think people should get to decide for themselves where they want to be rather than feeling like they're doing something wrong if they're not doing what other people think they should do.

The unicorn sounds amazing

Just to clarify a previous post, I absolutely don't assume I'm more creative than other, tidier people. I just think I'm more creative than I would be if I gave more of my energy to keeping things tidy especially with a 1 year old and a 3 year old running amok