The ADHD/ suspected ADHD/poor executive function/ generically disorganised and overwhelmed housekeeping thread

[MissKeithsNeice]

Diagnosed adhd. Medicated (hooray!). But no amount of medication can help me do anything when my dc and dh are in the house.

Dc are teens BTW

I work 4 days a week, term time only. On Fridays, I get shit done. Dh is also term time only. By the end of the summer holidays, the house us destroyed. Its just really hard to explain how bad it is.

Dh works really hard to keep on top of it but I'm just so messy that its an impossible task.

Today is my first Friday to myself for 8 weeks. I am so excited. Its going to take weeks to get this place straight but once it is, I'm getting a cleaner.

@Myadhdusername I was trying to get on board with the 24 days to open your front door but completely incapable of motivating myself to clean my kitchen (it’s not grim but not sparkling either). But I had to let someone in to my house today so I stayed up late to clean like a maniac and now I might just be capable of maintaining it. I really find this difficult because I hyper focus and get overwhelmed by all the little shabby things that need fixing, touching up or changing….most of which won’t get done.

My sweet wrappers end up stuffed in my pockets to erupt like confetti when I dig for change or take my keys out. I’m sorry you’re feeling angry with yourself about this. That must be hard. I’ve found much more self acceptance when I look at myself through the adhd lens. I don’t feel like a defective neurotypical anymore.

Thanks for those suggestions! I will follow them up. Reading this thread has definitely given me food for thought. I am beginning to think that perhaps both my father and myself display adhd typical characteristics...just read a list of adult symptoms and they really resonated. His seem now like onset of dementure but in fact I think he has always been like this and it seems worse with age. I find myself to be almost a copy of him in so many aspects... organisational problems; problems prioritising; not finishing jobs before starting new ones; I ticked nearly all of the list. Apart from finding coping strategies is there anything that can be done about it?

@petal2019 A Slob Comes Clean has just moved house and some of her podcasts mention this.

@BertieBotts I mentioned Doom Boxes. I'm probably in the same Facebook group. It literally describes my house. Everything is a doom box/shelf/drawer/cupboard. I used this phrase for the first time with DP about a specific box from his car, the other day, and he didn't even question it. It just makes sense. I think its origin is from a Facebook page I also follow. This explains a bit more about the post: www.truthorfiction.com/doom-boxes/

Yesterday, I wrapped ALL the presents for the children that are in the house. I hated it, and it took three times as long because squirrel but it's a big chunk of it done. So pleased with myself. Didn't vacuum though.

Just got an email from the A Slob Comes Clean newsletter. These are her two decluttering questions:

1. If I was looking for this item, where would I look for it first? (Take it there. Right now.)

2. If I needed this item, would it EVER occur to me that I already had one? (If not, I don't keep it.)

The TAKE IT THERE RIGHT NOW thing is the best tidying thing ever, whether you are doing a five minute pick up or slowly getting rid of stuff in a doom box.

Oh god wrapping! Every year I wrap as I go, but this year I’m just all over the place.
Well done for getting it done.

Ok I have done two monumental things. (Not both in one day).

1. Our bedroom has been a disaster because it is the room nobody spends time in except in the dark. And a chest of drawers had gone mouldy so I dragged it halfway across the room to clean it in pieces and then abandoned it for weeks. And it's the laundry dumping room. And the room that we dump literally everything in because it's the biggest clear (hahaha) space in the house. But our bed was falling apart and DH's last fix for it didn't work, so he wanted to fix it better, and asked me if I could clear a space on the floor for the bedding, mattress etc to go for him to do it. So I cleared and hoovered THE ENTIRE FLOOR. There were bugs living in our dust it was so bad (just carpet beetles aka "wooly bears" which sounds cute, but they are really really not. Harmless but gross.)

1. DS2 (3) emptied out two IKEA cubes of toys today looking for something to play with. So I joined in. I emptied 5 kallax cubes and 6 drawer-tubs from his bedroom on the living room floor and then I tidied them back up into 11 different categories so that I could label them. Now things that go together actually in theory should stay together. We can also find toys for the baby without having to trawl through loads of stuff. I chucked out some of the useless stuff as well that didn't work or was missing or broken or generally crap.

Awesome @BertieBotts

I think I may have found my people.
I don't have a dx of anything but I have 2 ND children (DS has and ASC and DD has an ASC and ADD) and I am very very aware that I am not NT in any way shape or form. The more I read about ADD in women the more bells ring.
I am paralysed by our house. I have NEVER been tidy or organised, ever. As a child my mum would put toys in my doorway to be put away and I would just step over them because, well, Lego and this book and I want to draw that picture.
I just ...... can't.
DS and I have dust allergies which are made a million times worse by the state of the house (and his room is a fetid pit of gloom and spiders and bleugh) and DDs room has mould on the ceiling where the walls got damp because our central heating pipes burst under the fucking floor. She wants it redecorating but both she and I are too frozen by the enormity of the task to do anything about it.

I tried FlyLady for a while but the shoe rule pissed my brain off.
I have also tried my own version of TOMM which works for a while.

I work as a TA in a primary school. Theoretically this is part time (25 hours) but fooling them all into believing that I am actually a functioning adult costs a lost of my spoons and I get home and collapse in a heap of bleugh while 'rehearsing' the tasks of the day in my head until hours have gone by and I have done nothing (again)

I do find that I am a perfectionist - I want the house to be tidy and spotless and I want it to be like that NOW and stay like that. I also find that I cannot bring myself to do the things I want to do - like crafting or reading a book - because I haven't done the 'chore'

I have a million books on solving my household issues and I have bought so much storage it isn't true.

DH, fabulous though he is, is blind to it all. If I ask him to do X or Y he'd do it in a heartbeat but..........
He, too, is ND in some way.

So, apologies for my ramble. I am off to look at a Slob Comes Clean. I would go and do some tidying but a)DH is working from home and b) I have a horrible chest infection so am laid up in bed with Christmas organisation falling apart around my ears!

Oh Jeff I hear you. Resonates so much with me.

Only piece of advice from 'the other side' of that gloom, is doing the washing up every day. Every damn day. God it's DULL. but if the kitchen isn't a blocker, it doesn't get me down. Then I can't be bothered to tidy anything else. Etc etc etc. You know how it goes.

Washing up every damn day.
1 of 15mins putting stuff away tidy up per day.

That is getting me through to Christmas. Haven't wrapped a single present, other than a mad rush last minute wrapping, obviously.

I have officially given up on Christmas cards. It's just not realistically going to happen.

@JeffVaderneedsatray are you me? I look around and I feel so fucking ashamed that this is how I live, how my children live. They are happy and healthy children but of course I know living in chaos will be affecting them.

I hope we can both find a way to improve things for ourselves.

I tried FlyLady for a while but the shoe rule pissed my brain off.

This made me Jeff!
I think A Slob Comes Clean will be much more to your liking. Her ‘rules’ are so much less perfectionist - don’t ‘shine the sink’ just do the dishes etc.

I’d shine my sink … but first I’d need to do a weeks worth of dishes

To be fair to fly lady, I dismissed her for ages because of the shine your sink thing, and then one day I thought why not and just read it.

Step one is "take all the dirty dishes out of the sink" :o :o :o

I think I actually cried. It was way before diagnosis and still when I was in "WTF is wrong with me why can't I just do normal things that everyone can do?" mode and it literally didn't occur to me that other people had dirty dishes hanging out in their sink literally all the time for days at a time. I thought I was uniquely dysfunctional.

Didn't stick with flylady but I was warmer to her for a while. I never got dressed up to shoes either.

@Myadhdusername

I’d shine my sink … but first I’d need to do a weeks worth of dishes

This is exactly what she talks about…

“Dishes Maths” - when one day’s washing up only takes 5 mins. But if you leave it 5 days, it’s not 5x5 = 25 mins it’s more like the best part of an hour. The dried on stuff takes longer, you have to stop to clear the draining board to make more room, you have to refill the bowl loads for clean water etc. But if you commit to doing it the next day it will definitely only take you 5 mins again.

Eh? I must be the world's slowest washer up, a day's worth would definitely take me at least 25 minutes. God I despise washing up. So glad I have a dishwasher, would never live without one again!

It must take at least five minutes just to run the water!

@BertieBotts

Eh? I must be the world's slowest washer up, a day's worth would definitely take me at least 25 minutes. God I despise washing up. So glad I have a dishwasher, would never live without one again!

Oh, I’m totally factoring in the dishwasher into the 5 mins

I mean those things that always hang around that can’t go in - in our house it’s annoying water bottles or special pans or rinsing recycling or whatever - and because the dishwasher is on you can think ‘I’ll just leave those cos they don’t really count’ and then before you know it a week has passed and they’re multiplying…

@BertieBotts

It must take at least five minutes just to run the water!

How big is your sink?

You dishwasher owners do not know the struggle

@Myadhdusername

You dishwasher owners do not know the struggle

Honestly I do - we had no dishwasher when DC were born and 2 under 2 plus washing up nearly broke me. We had the tiniest of kitchens in a rented house and I practically begged the LL to let us replace one cupboard with a half size dishwasher. Transformative! I’d happily sacrifice cupboard space again anywhere to get a dishwasher in.

Anyway, though, whether it takes 5 mins or 25 mins daily, the point is it will take more than it should if you don’t do the damn dishes every day, no matter how soul destroying.

I’m half thinking of going to do mine now … only half thinking but it’s there

Sink isn't that big but I've never lived anywhere with a fast hot tap.

Those one off items that can't go in the dishwasher are banned from my house. I dishwasher everything. I've given stuff away before because it wasn't dishwasher friendly. I also don't like the taste of water bottles that have been through it, so I reuse disposable water bottles until they get lost or broken.

I'm in hyperfocus mode: just started sorting clothes for my yonugest.
everything that's too small for him is gone already, now just need to trim the fat of this pile of what fits, because he doesn't have a rubber wardrobe 😁

also sorting sock (with 9 people in the house we have hundreds of pairs).

"Dishes math" is definitely a thing. And it doesn't matter if I end up with Jenga on the draining board. As long as the sink is reasonably empty when I get up in the morning the day starts well.

It's tricky not having a dishwasher. I'm not convinced it would be better as I have a tiny kitchen and I would need to have more crockery and cutlery but I'm willing to try one. Just need a bigger house.

Today I've decluttered some of my hallway. (Visible areas)