To be fascinated by tidy people

[tangerinemagic]

I’m just not tidy. Nor is my husband. We try. Actually very hard. We have two young children and a dog but there is literally stuff everywhere, all of the time.

I live in London, so we naturally have many parent friends right on our doorstep and there is a ‘drop in’ culture where we might wrap up a playground or common trip and head to each others houses.

Ours is not fit for that kind of spontaneity but others fling open their doors at any time and it’s like no one even lives there.

when conversations come up about chores, cleaning, tidiness, I recoil. They really are extremely tidy people and with young kids. You can’t mistake walking into a tidy persons house, it just feels, different.

The floors and sofa/furniture in our house just don’t look like theirs, even if you have a whip round and tidy you can tell.

So, tidy people, tell me, how do you do it. What are the tips. Was this nurture growing up in a tidy household? Or something you learned? AIBU to be ashamed my pram, car, house is always in need of a clean.

try a shoe dryer. We have one where the shoes live- it’s like a hairdresser for your shoes. Also can be used to pre warm boots or shoes in winter.

The original story wasn't mine. I was just giving one reason kids might not hang their own coat. Yes, I do remind her about the shoe rack. We've at least progressed from claiming she "can't" take her own shoes off 😅. She used to get in trouble for not helping clean up at nursery as well so at least she's consistent and it's not just me that has to tell her 10 times that shoes belong on the shoe rack. (She will tidy toys away but only if someone does it with her and we make a game of it. The last time I told her to put her crayons away because dinner was nearly ready she deliberately drew on the floor instead - which resulted in me tidying up the crayons myself, putting them out of her reach and making her clean the floor while still trying to finish cooking.)

I don't live in London - or even in the UK actually 😅.

Sorry, I mistook you for the OP, since my comments were aimed at them.

No worries. My fault for butting in 😅

Maybe she will just be one of life’s messy people.

I thought people would respond like this. What is tidying if not putting things back in their respective places? It doesn’t matter if you tidy them away in bursts when there’s “messes” everywhere, or whether you do it immediately after using any item so that “messes” seem never to accrue; it’s all tidying.

And it’s definitely not “a few times a day.” Like I said, it’s constantly, all day long. My day consists of more than just making breakfast, sitting and getting up from the sofa, and taking my own shoes and jacket off. I’m a functional adult who cares for herself and her family while we live together in the same house.

Like I said, to “tidy people,” cleaning “as you go” doesn’t feel like work at all, because you do it habitually. That doesn’t mean you’re some magical being who doesn’t generate laundry, use the bathroom, perform hygienic care on yourself and your children, create dishes and crumbs when you eat, entertain yourself when home, taking items in and out of your house as needed, etc. etc. etc. such that you do “less work” to keep your house tidy. It just means you don’t even think about it. “Untidy people” have the same amount of work; it just requires vigilance and effort to get and keep their houses at the same standard of tidiness.

”Oh, what are people doing that they have to mow their lawns every week? I have a magical lawn that I don’t even have to maintain… What’s that? No, silly, doing 1/7th of the lawn every day isn’t ‘mowing!’ That’s just ‘trimming,’ you see. It only takes 3 minutes.”

-_-

You’re super wound up about this but I just imagine you must be like Pig Pen from the Snoopy cartoons, just wandering around with a permanent dust pile around you creating mess with every step you take.

Honestly what the fuck are you doing all day long to create mess that needs constant tidying? It’s madness. Stop rampaging about causing havoc and you’ll have less to tidy.

No. It takes no extra time to put a coat on a peg, shoes on a rack, toothbrush back in a pot, towel on a rail, papers in a drawer etc etc than it takes to put them on a floor, back of a chair, dumped on a bed etc. But if DOES take additional time to pick them up off the floor, back of the chair etc and THEN eventually put them in the corrrect space.

It also takes additional time looking for lost items when things are not in their place. Leaving you even less time to tidy the tip you’ve made.

The only things your scenario applies to is washing up, cleaning crumbs and spills and making beds. Everything else definitely takes more time if you dump stuff in the ‘wrong’ place initially.

It also takes additional time looking for lost items when things are not in their place. Leaving you even less time to tidy the tip you’ve made.

So true. While DH is in hospital I have tidied his office and found loads of things he has misplaced because he just puts things down in random places then spends ages and ages and ages looking for them.

Tidy House tidy mind for me. I can’t relax if it’s messy to be honest so it does actually impact my mental health. My wife is not naturally tidy sadly for me.

eta - I also have a ‘if current btowngirl doesn’t want to do it, future btowngirl definitely won’t’ attitude towards just getting stuff done.

This thread is genuinely fascinating, I've been really enjoying reading through everyone's perspectives. Reflecting on the comments so far, it seems clear that people fall into different camps: some are naturally tidy, others less so; some feel stressed by clutter, while others barely notice it. For some, messiness might be linked to ADHD, and for others, it’s simply a personal style. Ultimately, we’re all just human, unique in how we function, what we value, and how we navigate our spaces. This is just one more example of the beautiful diversity in how we live our lives.

But it does take extra (immediate) time to open a letter, put the envelope in the recycling, walk to another room, find the right folder, punch holes in the letter, file the letter in the right section and put the folder back on the shelf vs. putting the letter back in the envelope and placing it on the table beside me to deal with later.

Putting a cup on the coffee table next to me vs. walking to the kitchen - unless your kitchen and living room are centimetres apart of course taking it to the kitchen takes more (immediate) effort. Same with back of the chair or whatever. To you taking a cardigan upstairs then sex your take it off is second nature/"not tidying". To untidy people it's tidying the cardigan up straight away vs. placing it on the chair to tidy up later. Both are tidying, but in the second scenario you're taking everything that's accumulated upstairs at once. In the first you're taking up a cardigan, then a few hours later a teddy bear that's wandered downstairs, then some dry laundry (I'm just guessing at items here - I live in a flat so I don't have an upstairs 😅).

Coat on a rack, towel back on the hook, toothbrush in the holder, deodorant back in the bathroom cupboard actually are things I do straight away because the coat rack is next to the door where I take off my coat so it would actually be more effort to take the coat to a chair, similarly the towel hook, toothbrush holder and cupboard are right there so of course I'm not going to randomly take those items out of the bathroom and place them somewhere else. My daughter's room is not next to the front door so whatever toy she took to nursery ends up in the living room until I tidy it away later along with the ones I didn't have time to deal with earlier.

With her parents it's entirely possible. Maybe it's genetic 😅. Or tidying is just really boring when you're 3! She's a stickler for putting rubbish in the bin though - she's constantly picking up random bits of packaging that people have dropped outside and carrying them until we pass a bin. That's definitely my doing - I absolutely hate littering! At home if she unwraps a sweet or finishes a carton of juice it's 50/50 whether she hands me the rubbish or wants to take it to the bin herself, but she absolutely doesn't throw it on the floor.

Ahh, I'll bite 😆

Let's take making a sandwich.

Getting out the spray and the cloth. Wiping down the worktop. Wiping the door/window/fridge/freezer/microwave handles. Wiping down the windowsill and tops of fridge and microwave. Sweeping and mopping the floor. THAT is cleaning. I do it weekly. Not when I've made a sandwich.

Grabbing the dish sponge, dampening it momentarily under the tap, swiping up most of the sandwich crumbs with it, shaking it into the sink for all of two seconds and leaving those crumbs there, before putting the sponge back between the taps with some crumbs still attached...that is not cleaning. That is part of the task of making a sandwich and it takes less than 10 seconds.

You know what else I don't do? I don't get out a bread knife, a butter knife, a cheese knife, a chopping board. I get out a dinner plate and an ordinary knife (think it's called a steak knife, the serrated ones we eat dinner with). I hack off two slices of bread with it and some wedges of cheese, then use the same knife to wonkily scrape some butter over the bread and 😱 dip the same knife into the chutney inevitably leaving the odd butter streak behind (which kills nobody, so who cares). Meaning 99.9% of the crumbs created are on the plate with the sandwich and I rarely have to wipe any up.

When I've finished eating there's one plate and one knife to add to the stack of dishes beside the sink for me to wash before bed (my preference to do it this way) and maybe occasionally a few rogue crumbs on the worktop that will get dealt with during the weekly cleaning, if they're not swiped up with that damp sponge again after the washing up since I have it in my hand.

Work smarter, not harder.

We are naturally untidy. Not dirty though. Doom piles of letters, chargers un plugged and go in a supermarket carrier bag next to the sofa. Wash up always after meals, bins out, laundry on most days, kitchen and bathroom cleaned properly every week and spruced as we go.

Biggest game changer is getting rid of stuff. So the doom piles get smaller. We have become militant on this. Every school holiday we do a bit of a declutter and deep clean. You can get away with running the hoover round etc in the meantime.

The mess all over the house gets easier as they get older- don't need highchairs or buggies. But then you have the whole teenager bedroom thing 🙃

I love this, and I agree. It's why I love MN (most of the time ❤️)

Does anyone want to share a pic of a tidy space of theirs? Nothing identifiable of course, but visual is always much more helpful than written.

What spaces would you like to see?

Are you saying that some people don't know what tidy looks like?

Just google tidy room images.

My house is tidy, not clinically tidy as we have photos, pictures, plants, books, CDs and DVDs (yes, I know). But everything is in or on bookshelves and cupboards and there is nothing strewn over the floor or furniture.

Some people genuinely do struggle to visualise the end result, and looking at images of other people's tidy houses is unlikely to help. It's one of the tips that goes around ADHD spaces - when you do get your space to a place that you like (whether someone helps you with that or not) take a photo of it. Or if you're parent to an ADHD child, help them tidy their room/bag/desk/etc and then take a photo to print for them to refer back to.

I can't tell if that's an issue I have or not - I have quite good visual imagination, so I can look at a space for example and imagine a wall painted a different colour, or a different-sized piece of furniture there. I can see that if I've lived with a messy space for a while, it's difficult to picture that space any differently. I do think if you're used to a space being clean, it's easier to spot what's out of place and sort it, rather than being used to it being a mess and then just adding to the mess because you don't know where to start with sorting it.

From what I observe it seems like naturally tidy people either have houses which have a lot of space (and therefore a lot of room for storage), or very few belongings.

Lots of previous posters have reiterated the “everything having a place it belongs” advice but the reality is that sometimes you end up in a situation where you’re living somewhere very small, and a normal number of belongings won’t fit there. A small flat is fine for one person with modest belongings - add in a second or third person with a similar quantity and suddenly you’re a messy person despite your best efforts.

I’d be more curious to know how others deal with this sort of issue. Do you just live with the clutter? Are you absolutely ruthless with beautiful/valuable/sentimental belongings which you know you’d want to keep if you lived somewhere larger?

I know someone who used to put things they weren’t sure about in a cupboard for a year, and if they hadn’t looked at them in that time they got rid of them, but I find it impossible to be that ruthless, especially with sentimental belongings from people who I cherish or have passed away.

Having a time limit on things doesn't work for me either, mainly because there are things that I might not use/look for for over a year but still want. I find it a weird, arbitrary thing, even though I do understand the idea behind it. For sentimental items, the advice in all the methods which have helped me is to "build up" your decluttering muscle/skill by working on easier things first and leave the sentimental items until you're much more confident. Sorting through clothes, or books, or tools or board games or whatever is much easier than trying to make decisions which make you feel guilty. And if an item in an "easy" category is making you feel sentimental, then reclassifying that item not as a book/t-shirt/cooking pot, but as a piece of sentimental memorabilia, helps avoid stalling. And means I can move it from the wardrobe, bookcase or kitchen (if I don't actually use it) to the sentimental items wardrobe!

I would recommend Dana K White's podcast A Slob Comes Clean - just start listening at any point. The latest episode, the first, a random title which catches your eye. I do like her "container concept" which is sort of related - it's about letting the amount of space dictate the amount of stuff to keep and prioritising within those boundaries - it makes sense if you listen to her ramble about it for a while (and she is quite rambly!)

Then I liked the idea which might have been from Marie Kondo, to make the most of sentimental items by finding a way to display or use them so you can actually enjoy them regularly. That made me start to use my grandma's plates rather than saving them "for best". But it might also be something like - I never use that cooking pot, because it's rusty and I think it might put toxins in our food - but I like the colour, and it reminds me of my other grandma, so I could drill holes in it, remove the handle and repurpose it as a planter.

Nail on the head. If you tidy as you go along, you're making better more efficient use of time. Eg instead of standing idly waiting for the kettle to boil, you could wipe the kitchen surface, do some washing up, put some kitchen stuff away, etc. By doing stuff constantly throughout the day, you don't need to spend a whole morning (or day) doing all your housework and "life admin" at the weekend or your day off. I do my ironing in the lounge watching TV. I do a quick wipe around the bathroom after showering waiting for my hair tongues to heat up.

And a huge yes to the amount of wasted time that someone with an untidy house would waste looking for stuff that they (or partner/children) couldn't find as it's got hidden/lost under something or behind something or they've simply forgotten where it was left. The old adage of "a place for everything and everything in it's place" is so true - it makes life so much easier for everyone to know where stuff "lives" - the problem is getting them into the habit of putting it in it's place when they come in and putting stuff back in it's place after use, but like all habits, the more they do it (the more you insist they do it), eventually they'll do it automatically!

A massive wake up call for me was my father's death. I was brought up in an untidy/chaotic household where nothing "had a place" and things were just left/abandoned all over the house. My father's job had a very early start so he always left for work before anyone else was awake. One morning we got a knock at the door from the police saying they'd found his body! Apparently, instead of taking the car to work that morning, he'd walked - or tried to, and had collapsed on the way with a heart attack. We have to assume he couldn't find the car keys - they didn't have a hook or dish to keep the car keys in the same place, so it was often a matter of hunting around the house to try to find them. That morning, he clearly couldn't find them and rather than waking the whole house, just decided to walk instead! We found the car keys in the pocket of his shorts that he'd worn the night before! That really brought it home to me about the importance of having "homes" for things, and ever since, I've been paranoid about "a place for everything and everything in it's place" and have successfully trained my OH and son to comply in our family home. I can't remember the last time any of us lost anything!

I find prioritisation a real issue. I literally don't know where to start a lot of the time. And I run out of time/energy if I try to do everything all at once. What has been helpful for me has been to stop trying to prioritise and just write everything that needs to be done down on a card (one card for each thing) so I don't forget about things and then work through the cards when I've got some energy to do something. I find it saves mental headspace as I'm not thinking "what should I do now?" or getting overwhelmed by everything I have to do.