Do you ever feel like you have FINISHED cleaning the house?

[ItHasANiceRingWhenYouLaugh]

Someone I know just posted on FB that they love walking around their house when they have finished cleaning it. Mine NEVER feels finished! How do you get that feeling?

Artnco-you have it dead right. I see my machine all kinds up in the kitchen as my little line of soldiers waiting to get working for me. When the dishwasher, washer, tumbler and roomba are all hard at it, i feel very happy. Well worth the 42p per unit elec charge where i live. Still beats doing it myself.....

All lined up.......

Once. In about 2013. For about half an hour, then DC came home from Granma's and the place looked like an explosion in a toy factory, with added laundry, after five minutes.

But most of time, it's fairly presentable on a Monday afternoon and that's good enough for me.

Not actually finished, but done enough.

I have recently reached this place and it makes me very happy.

I do not like immaculate houses (or at least I don't want to live in one) but I can't bear mess, Ming and clutter.

I am now testing in a comfortable bracket, even at its messiest I would not turn visitors away but it's never so tidy that dd would feel uncomfortable getting her toys out.

Testing = resting

Mine looks like I've barely started never mind finished.

There's just so much stuff. Where does it all come from?

Nope, cleaning is never finished as there's always more I feel I could do. Same with my job (teacher). I must be a glutton for punishment!

I've decided that I need to start giving myself more of a sense of it being done enough. I need that feeling so I have started consciously thinking 'Is this job done?' even if that is qualified by 'For now' or 'done enough'. It helps a bit.

I think it will also help when I'm Decluttering (something I struggle with) to think `Is this room now easy to maintain and get a sense of it being really done? ' Presently the answer is usually no.

I'd say a cautious yes... But only because...

We live in a two bed apartment, so not too big, only 80m square.
I am SAHM with two kids in school / nursery so no baby and no job to juggle
Neither DH nor I like 'stuff', we are not quite minimalist but we do like clear surfaces and have practically zero ornaments bar pictures of the DC

IF I get One weekend morning or afternoon to myself at home, I can have the bathroom and wc cleaned, all toys etc tidied away, living room, bedrooms and hall dusted and rugs hovered, kitchen cleaned and all tiled / hard floors cleaned. And dinner in the oven! It's one advantage of a small living space, it can go from disaster zone to clean and tidy fairly quickly, if everything has a place to go.

That's the feeling I want! My house is pretty big and the kids seem to spread their stuff everywhere, so there is generally a lot to do to get it on track. I've never really got into the habit of everything having a place but I am starting to understand that I need it in order to avoid the awful dithering and the feeling of things never being finished.

Before we had kids I kept the house pretty spotless and enjoyed it looking that way. 13 years later... I'm still learning to accept that it aint never going to look that way again! I get a little "glow" when I've done the toilets, bathrooms and floors, and have been known to stand there admiring them (bit sad that) but then someone comes along and uses them or tramps mud/sand all over the floor and I start feeling I've just wasted my time. It can be a bit disheartening. I think the best thing is to try and lower standards a bit, accept things can't always look spotless. Re the roomba hoover - my mum has one and she swears by it, so I'm seriously considering asking for Christmas as that might keep things under control a bit...

We're probably much lazier and have lower standards than many, but we do cleaning as a blitz (in theory every week). So the house gets tidied, dusted, vacuumed, wiped and mopped within a couple of hours, and as we are all hard at it (me, dh and two teens) no mess is created during the cleaning. and at the end it looks and smells fairly good. Not as nice as coming home from work after our lovely cleaner had visited though!

It was never finished when I was with exdp as he never put anything back in the right place, was always creating mess and had every bit of space filled with clutter; couches we didn't need, extra chairs, too many bookshelves, piles of crap that he couldn't throw out yet had no place for so it filled every available place up. It's impossible to clean around clutter.

My house is easy to clean now because I've thrown everything out. Rather than spending five or six hours a day trying to clean away junk, it takes about half an hour to an hour, that's with a toddler. There's no mess because everything has it's own place. I've given dd her own playroom so her toys can be contained there as I got sick of my house looking like a toystore.

I've also gotten rid of all furniture that I need to move to clean underneath, everything has legs which means I can whizz through each room with the Hoover and mop in minutes because there's nothing in the way.