To think truly chaotic messy people don't/can't change?

[houseofchaosandclothes]

I have two small children, a demanding full-time job, a partner with a demanding full-time job and a parent with stage 4 cancer. (I also probably have ADHD but I'm stuck on a waiting list and not sure what difference a diagnosis would make. )

Yet the biggest source of stress in my life is my house. There are clothes everywhere - in laundry baskets waiting to be sorted and washed, in different shaped laundry baskets waiting to be sorted and put away. The toys are out of control. We can spend an hour cleaning the kitchen for one meal time to leave it destroyed.

I have read every thread about housekeeping and organising approaches in the world, and nothing seems to translate. It seems to take me twice as long as all these guides say it should to do something. TOMM is insane: fifteen minutes to do exactly what with a load of laundry? I can throw one in the washing machine in that time but sorting and putting it away will take me 45. We have a cleaner, and I would say spend 3/4 hours a week trying to scoop up the chaos enough she can clean around it. I try to declutter but every inch we reclaim seems to take a day and a half, and my limited annual leave and spare time is better spent with my parents or children. My husband does about 75% of the housework as he is much more efficient but we're still in chaos.

And I have spent YEARS of my life convinced I can change it. I grew up in a somewhat similar house. I'm 40. I have made half-hearted stabs at everything from flylady to a slob comes clean to Marie Kondo and nothing has changed and I'm starting to think that actually all the people who use these methods are not, in fact, the truly chaotic and messy. Or if they are, they don't have jobs/kids/sick parents/all of the above.

So I guess this is my question: has anyone truly messy and chaotic and terrible at housework reformed themselves? Have they done it when they have other things going on? Or are all these approaches just ways for ultimately organised people to get back on track and have nothing to say to the truly messy among us?

You need a sort of housekeeper... one that will wash,dry,put clothes away.
Tidy things for you.

Would your cleaner be able to incorporate that , maybe add an extra hour on her clean ?

My dil sounds very much like you (I'm her unpaid housekeeper)😁

OP I don't have a magic solution as to how I reformed but I did. I was truly messy as a child/teenager/young adult and into my early 30s. As I always lived in a house share I was always tidy in communal areas but my bedroom was an absolute bombsite. You could never see the floor. This is what happened: whenever I was dating someone if they were coming back to mine I would have to frantically shove everything in the cupboard / under the bed in a mad panic. Sometimes I got caught out and was embarrassed. When I met my now DH, because he became a regular visitor as it were and spent so much time at mine it was just too much hard work trying to mad tidy up all the time so I started trying to keep it tidier. And then when we moved in together, well he is very very tidy and basically would hate it if our home was messy. We do little and often, tidy up as we go along so rarely have to do a big tidy, we just put stuff away as we go. It's genuinely become habit now, and I don't like mess.

I think in a completely unconscious way this is what did it for me: messier (or rather the mad mad panic tidy when someone was coming round) had become harder than keeping on top of things.
Little and often until it becomes habit.

I feel your pain! As pp have said - firstly be kind to yourself, 2 parents working FT with young children is a ridiculous ask by itself imho.

I'm in a similar situation. 40, 2 young DC ( infant school) and pretty sure I have adhd. I also think DH has adhd ( and hoarding tendencies) and also eldest child also very very like me, v likely adhd. So already, you can imagine the chaos.

I've found I've got better over the years as I've had to with kids and it's got easier with old kids.

Things that help:

Having a weekly cleaner. I do the mad run around before, but it sort of resets the place each week.

'Be your future friend' do jobs to make future you'd life easier, e.g. get everything ready the night before- e.g. clothes, bag packed, lunch made. So much easier!! More likely to be on time and remember everything. Although it slips and this week I was scrabbling round in the dark trying not to wake dh @ 5.30am for some pants and cursing myself for not getting stuff ready.

That goes for household jobs. See the dishwasher needs emptying/ refilling? Bins need emptying, toilet needs cleaning? Just do it there and then. For some reason I used to put everything off and it all.piles up and becomes unmanageable. Little and often

Laundry - just stick one load on a day, hand one load out, folding and put away another. It's better than nothing!

Write everything on a family calender. I get overwhelmed with too much stuff in my head.

The problem I used to have is leaving everything to 'tomorrow' meaning you come to cook dinner but need to clean the kitchen first- takes ages and is exhausting compared to if you rest the kitch the night before. It's culmulative so you might drive home in your messy car, from a job where you might have made mistakes that day. Then you walk into a messy house and feel overwhelmed.

Decluttering - like pp say, I donate rather than sell. Selling is too messy for me. Do little bits like 5 mins through your babies drawers.

Yes, I am a reformed messy person. I have sorted it by:

Thinking through every task very carefully, figuring out what was making it hard, and coming up with a step by way of doing it which works so I don't get 'stuck'.

Not starting new bad habits, e.g. leaving clothes out to wear again tomorrow. NO! Everything goes in wash basket of dirty, or back in drawer if clean.

Regular clearouts. Easier to manage stuff with less stuff. Easier to managing washing with fewer clothes!

feeling so motivated after I’ve read all these comments. I have all my toddler’s baby clothes sitting in bags, tomorrow I’m going to go through them and put a few bundles and a few of the nice outfits/jackets on vinted. Whatever hasn’t sold by next weekend il donate. That gets rid of three big bags of stuff.

I’m pregnant and can’t wear half the stuff in my wardrobe so I’m going to go through and take out anything I can’t wear right now. The rest can go in a vacuum bag in the cupboard, only if I will definitely wear it again soon!

then I’m tackling, my makeup box, the hall cupboard and utility room. I will have a mountain of stuff to get rid of but can’t wait to just be able to see so much more empty space in my house

When I re-modelled my lounge, I initially wanted to do that because I needed more storage, but once I started looking at furniture and the style I wanted to have I soon came to the realization that I didn't want a whole pile of Kallax units from Ikea which I could fill with crap and that the solution was actually to have less storage, even though that's counter-intuitive, and get rid of the crap.

One problem area was two large coffee tables with shelves underneath, one of which had two drawers which were crap magnets. The shelves were constantly full of stuff - just a dumping ground - and it absolutely did my head in. I couldn't concentrate on anything because my eyes were being constantly drawn to all this crap. So I took a risk and bought coffee tables with no storage at all and bought open shelving. I bought some nice storage boxes to go on the shelves along with the usual books etc, Those boxes are for current projects. Instead of having crap lying around on tables and spare surfaces, each project has it's own box and the stuff goes in there. It's so much easier. I constantly have several projects on the go at once, rather than concentrating on one then moving on to the next.... but this has really helped.

I've felt much better since I did all of that and amazingly it's now been over 2 months and the lounge has remained tidy the whole time.

Maybe analyze exactly what is contributing to the mess - and that could be easily available surfaces and random drawers of doom which attract crap.
Buying more storage units isn't always the right solution because it's not tackling the problem of there being too much stuff.

It's hard to change your underlying character/ traits, but you can learn systems and methods that are more effective for you.

Good youtubers:
Clutterbug: she has ADHD. She identifies 4 methods of organising style.
When my sandwich toaster's been put away in the cupboard, I can go many months forgetting it's there and going toasted-sandwich-less. I need to see things as prompts. I need spaces to put clutter, and short term/ regular action items, so use "clutter baskets" to contain it to restricted zones, and when they're overflowing, it's time for action. Some people can hide things and remember they exist for use. People vary in how much detail to sort by.

Dana K White/ A slob comes clean: more ADHD. The container concept. The no mess method. "Just put it away" normally results in wandering the house in a confused haze of half-done jobs, and missing the point, but if I'm on a 30 minute targeted declutter/ tidy, it does work at avoiding being left with overwhelming piles when the time's up. 30 minutes better.

TOMM: works well at an even spread of managing the key living zones of the house across the week. The concept of doing it by time works well. I grew up with "tidy your room" which was a vast, overwhelming near impossible mission when faced with clutter and a lack of storage. Tidying was always a negative, often rage inducing task of facing inadequacy, and if it didn't fail was so bloody exhausting that it required a few days off and you've blinked and found it all a shit tip again.

TOMM has launched www.rockthehousework.co.uk/ of podcasts that talk you through cleans/ tasks. It's basically an ADHD strategy of mirroring and takes a lot of the exhausting thinking out of the process.

I'm finding that there are two types of people, those who realise that this is life-changing genius, and those who are baffled by the concept of being told how to clean/ tidy. But that's the thing, it's a skill to learn. We accept for just about everything else that we have to learn for instance driving lessons, but somehow we're supposed to crack on with knowing how to be clean and tidy out of nowhere! When we sort out a room, we could be dealing with hundreds of items and that's all decisions about where to put it. If you do it in an ineffective order, you can end up wasting time and making more mess. It's draining and frustrating. According to conventional logic you'd do the floor last because of gravity, but doing it that way meant that I always lost focus way before then, and the bits on the floor would annoy me, and I never got round to it, but traditionally, starting by cleaning the bare bits of floor was a result and focused me. Doing it by time not by a mega job has helped because it's more of a little and often approach and it's better, not a failiure. Having a podcast tell me that I'm going to spend 3 minutes clearing the surfaces then 2 minutes wiping them is just genius!

I never didn't care. I was just always overwhelmed, frustrated and lacking in strategy. It was like giving a non-driver a set of car keys and telling them to drive to somewhere they'd barely heard of. The house is far from immaculate, but I do now know that it's managable to get it back in control and presentable within an hour or two.

When the kids were young they had very few clothes. They got to wear their favourite stuff lots regardless of whether it was a party dress or jeans.

The best thing was washing most days, hanging it up on hangers to dry and going straight in the wardrobe or being worn again.

They had 10 pairs of identical socks each, 10 pairs of knickers etc no piles of washing say around.

There are probably a number of things at work here, but only you’ll know if they resonate

• any household with small children is going to be messy, because parents don’t have time, the washing is endless (meaning done is always drying and some is always waiting to be put away), and the toys are numerous
• children will cause chaos
• your house may be too small for the amount of stuff you have/ you don’t have sufficient storage
• you may have more stuff than you need
• apparently there is a strong link between adhd and messiness

some things you can obviously do something about, others you can’t.
but I find it amazingly calming to take things to recycling or the charity shop

I'm with you and suspect I may also have ADHD. I think the secret is to get rid of STUFF. Too much STUFF and nowhere to put it all because the cupboards are full.
My house is better than it was but still a long way to go. I operate a one in, at least one out policy and have realised trying to sell stuff like clothes/shoes doesn't really work as I just end up with a pile of things I need to list that sit there for literally years. So now it gets bagged up, put in the car and dropped off at the charity shop.

It's very difficult. I dip in and out of flylady and try to follow her routines but I maybe manage a few days of efficiency every month. I figure it's better than nothing.

My dh & kids are like you, they are neurodiverse and are not bothered by mess.
Re: laundry - every time a load is dry, I sort through & put out grown items into a bag. The bag is put straight into the boot to drop off at the charity shop.

Clothes - I'm not buying any kids clothes until the summer, they can wear out what they've got

I buy one size larger so it accommodates growth spurts and I buy less clothes in the long run.

D

Mostly following as I am bad at this and I need to read the whole thread.

But (with input from DH who is better):

Everything must have somewhere it lives. If you have things that 'live' on the work surface in your kitchen, try to rearrange things so you don't.

The every task is two tasks thing is something I really need to internalize. My sister in law does this. It's terrifying but effective.

How old are your kids? It's impossible to be everyone's tidy-upper especially if you are (like me) someone who doesn't 'see' it. Kids need to learn to put things away, at least things that are not in their bedrooms. (This is a work in progress at our house).

Try to do things in spare moments. It can take me 45 minutes to fold and put away laundry too but if I focus I can do it in 2 or 3 short sessions fitted into gaps in the day. (Also after Marie kondo I now love this activity, her vertical fold method and s very satisfying).

You have too much stuff. That's why you can't get organised.
Get rid of some of the clothes and toys for a start. If you have too many plates cups etc then get rid of some too. Every time you leave a room, if there are things that don't belong there then take them with you and put them away.

There's also procrastination, saying you're busy doing this and that cleaning but you're not, really. Just moving things around. eg wiping down worktops, cooker, fridge freezer & sweeping floor daily takes minutes.

You have a lot on your plate, + ADHD so that also comes into play. But too much stuff/disorganised home just makes you miserable and anxious 3 so it needs to be tackled. As a pp said it can take years. You just have to start. I used to be similar, a massive declutter has taken around 3 years but the weight off my mind is lovely. I do still have to keep on top of things but it's far easier

But again, its too much stuff and the fact you have to move stuff out of the way so cleaner can actually clean, bears that out. If you don't get rid of stuff then you'll be up to your neck in chaos for years on end and nothing is worth that.

The one thing that helped me was being absolutely ruthless with getting rid of stuff, and having an easy way to get rid of it. I don’t keep stuff ‘just in case’ and I accept I might have to rebuy things in the future. I don’t keep completed books or jigsaws, clothes I barely wear are gone, I have about 4 pairs of shoes.

Even going to the charity shop becomes an uncomfortable task to me that I put off, so I do two things.

I either take it to the tip, all of it, and recycle there. Or the best thing I’ve found is putting a huge pile in my front garden and putting ‘free to good home’ on Facebook. It’s always all gone by the end of the day, anything left behind goes in the bin.

Treat the laundry like a project at work. I imagine someone is coming to inspect it! I’m always struggling with it but it does help.
I do folding and putting away every morning just a quick 2 or 3 minutes. I also try a few times a week to go through their clothes and consider one thing added to a charity bag to be a victory!

Everyone thinks im mad as i find a very clean house incredibly stressful and sterile. My sister thinks i make that up but i dont it makes my skin itch.

I compramise that the kitchen and bathroom are always clean, i do everthing ince a day and a clean ie bleach sat morning.

Massive tubs for toys ans everything end of dsy gets chucked in and stacked up.

Hoovering once or twice a week and dusting prob once a month as i dont see the point!

It dosnt have to be sterile and spotless like instagram just liv3d in

I do think part of it is genuinely not 'seeing' it - I see the overall effect, but I can walk over junk mail in the hallway for days and its like it won't occur to me to pick it up and put it in the bin. I don't have another way to describe it.

I'm a bit like this, OP.

In response to your question about whether we can change, I think yes we can but it happens quite naturally and takes a while.

My DH is a very tidy and organised person, I am not, but since being with him I'm much better than I was. The driver for this with me was that I could see it was stressing him out, so I made huge efforts to start to 'notice' mess that wouldn't bother me previously.

I'm still more on the cluttered/ messy side than he is, but over the years it has now become more of a habit for me to just notice and pick up that junk mail, for example.

My DH's mental health was a big motivation for me and flipped a switch in my brain which seems to have stayed on.

So yes I think people can change but you need a big motivation.

Dana from a slob is good at explaining how to deal with things you don't notice.

She calls it slob vision as she just doesn't notice what's around her. The way she suggests dealing with it is a 5 minute pick up so you are actually looking for things out of place, plus daily habits that suit you.

So for her one was shutting all kitchen cupboard doors before her DH got home from work as otherwise she would never notice she had left them all open.

I think she's mastered that but still does daily 5 minute pickups and her daily tasks are things like sweep the kitchen floor because otherwise she won't notice when it needs doing, check bathroom counters for clutter and a few others.

She advises a laundry day but that doesn't work for me. Pre decluttering I used to end up with baskets of clean washing filling my bedroom so following A Slob and Minimal Mom I got rid of my big washing baskets, got rid of a lot of clothes and now fold and sort clothes straight from the dryer or washing line.

I only have small rectangular baskets and we have one each. Clothes get sorted into each persons basket and then they put it away themselves. Your DCs might be too small but I got mine started on it pretty young. The trick is to make sure there is room in their drawers to put the clean clothes away!

The main rule is always do your dishes no matter what though, it makes such a difference if the kitchen is useable without having to do loads of dishwashing first.

So I should be clear that my house is very much still a work in progress and by tidy people's standards is still pretty messy. But by me standards its vastly improved. I can get the downstairs to guest-acceptable in maybe 5-10 minutes now. The spare room still takes more work.

I think for me the key parts were:

1. Like you, getting a cleaner.

1. Baskets/containers. i.e. my food cupboards are no longer total chaos because each set of things is in a pull out basket with a handle. The basket might be pretty chaotic, but it doesn't threaten to all fall out on my head whenever I open it.

1. Using what a slob comes clean terms "awkward" gaps - even a few minutes helps.

1. Consistently putting the dishwasher on even if I could probably fit another couple of things into it after the next meal (but not a whole meal's worth) - this is still a work in progress, I don't always do this.

1. Realising that the fact I just want to slump onto the sofa while e.g. food is in the oven, or go straight up to bed instead of hanging the washing out/cleaning the kitchen up is irrelevant. It's shit, and I don't enjoy it but when I do it my whole life is way more under control. Again definitely still a work in progress, but realising I would never feel like doing any of those jobs so I just have to do them even though I don't feel like them was definitely a revelation.

With two little kids and both working you will constantly be juggling for years so firstly.

BE KIND TO YOURSELF

if your kids are healthy, clean, fed and loved that is all you need. I was like you and I am like you. The mess is less now because my kids are older mostly not here and I work from home.

I don't think it is going to help to think you can't change things. You and your husband manage demanding jobs so you can manage running your home. I have become more tidy over time partly by realising that I am responsible , no one else is going to do the task if I don't. I remember walking by something on the stairs a few times and then thinking who do I think is going to move that if I don't. Find a place for the things you need, get rid of what you don't need. We aren't spotless but kitchen work surfaces are clear every night , there is one pile of washing to put away. The only way to do it is just by doing it.

That 1 task is actually 2 tasks is pretty mind blowing! I've always struggled with being untidy, I just don't think I have it in me to be different.I have a problem with making decisions, so although I know things need a place to live I can never decide where. So I often just leave things out or I'll forget where they are! I also find it emotionally hard to let go of things. I'm moving house in a few months and the thought of having to go through all my stuff makes me want to hide under the duvet!

See while I love ASCC I can't get behind the Laundry Day system - it seems to me that this only works if you have a dryer (because I could not possibly dry a week's worth of laundry in 1-2 days otherwise) and a utility room. If I had all the laundry for the week piled in the kitchen by the machine it would be in the way, it would get dirtier with food being dropped on it, children would play in it (yuck) and I'd get distracted and never finish it in one day, people would trip over it, clean would get mixed up with dirty, people would put more stuff in the piles - just in general sounds like a huge chaotic nightmare and NOPE. Plus, I like to use the eco cycle on my washing machine when possible and that takes 4 hours. I think American washing machines don't do this from what I have gathered, and everyone in the US has a dryer and laundry room/nook/garage, or they seem to have no washing machine at all and use a laundromat.

What has helped me with laundry:

Getting a tumble dryer. I resisted it until kid 3 and then I went for it and it has honestly been life changing. I used to procrastinate getting the washing out of the machine because it required me to spend energy hanging it up (and likely removing the clothes from the drying line too) and one of my coping mechanisms for ADHD is not to start a task unless I can definitely finish it and/or there is a way to leave it half-done. Now I can always take washing from one machine to another, that is extremely easy and short. Even if I have to empty the dryer first, I can simply empty it into a basket and leave it in the basket if I really have to, to keep the laundry train rolling. That means I don't have to re-wash a load that has gone mildewy and nothing needs ironing ever.

Before we got a dryer, I had 2x tower airers - if you have any that are like stacked XXX replace them with tower shape, they take up the same footprint but the clothes have so much more air space which means they dry better.

One day I calculated how many loads of washing we needed to do per week by collecting clothing for the whole family x however many days + 1 set of bedding (meaning each bed would only individually get changed every 2 weeks but that was probably still more often than it was happening) + 1 towel per person + 1 hand towel + cleaning cloths/tea towels for a week's use and put it all in a pile, then sorted it into washing baskets. At that time, as a family of 3, it made up 4 wash loads. So I knew that I needed to do 4x laundry loads per week and I suppose I did a "mini laundry day" - my routine was this:

Collate load 1 and put in machine on whatever cycle
Go about day
When that load finished, collate load 2, empty load 1.
Select shortest full cycle (90 mins) for load 2, start.
Select podcast, start.
Bring load 1 into bedroom. Empty airer of previous 2 loads from last laundry day. Sort into piles immediately.
Hang up load 1
Put away previous 2 loads
By this time load 2 was often finished, so hang up.

The whole process took an hour or two and so I could do that 2x per week and the previous time's washing was dry.

Lastly the task completion thing - if I know I'm sorting/folding but can't put away then I put it back into a laundry basket so that it does not end up getting walked on or kicked around.

OP this thread has inspired me to have a good declutter this weekend. I’m certain that all of my possessions will still be littered all over my house but at least there will be less of them!