Secrets of Naturally Tidy People

[Seabird]

Calling all naturally tidy people - pleease give me some tips! My house is always such a mess. It seems to me that this is inevitable with 2 under-2s, but everyone else's houses always seem to be tidy. How do they do it????

The children are at my mum's this weekend and I spent 3 hours blitzing the kitchen but I know that within minutes of their return it will be back to its usual state. My sitting room is full of piles of papers to deal with, mail order catalogues I'm intending to find time to look through etc - what does everyone else do with these? (Look at them immediately they arrive? If I tidy them into a pile I never find them again.)

The weird things is that when I worked as a lawyer my office was always immaculate! (I'm now a SAHM.)

Do I need a System??

I will be sooo grateful if anyone can help!

Get your children used to having very little attention.

Today I taught my two-year-old how to use my saw to saw up bits of old pipe insulation (which I said was pretend wood) which entertained her for nearly two hours while I cleaned out the shed and occasionally shouted "How's it going Bob?"

Marvellous.

I don't understand how anyone can be as tidy as the people I share coffee with. It's the little things that build up the mess. Yet when I go to their homes it's as if the children are not allowed to play with toys until visitors are there, as they are never any on the floors/beds/etc and as if the post man never calls, they never seem to have the post waiting to be looked at, not even for dh when he gets in from work. so come on you tidy lot tell me how is it done?????

Otherwise I will stick with the saying, a tidy house is the sign of a very very dull woman especially after reading this lot!!!!!!

jane I used to have a career and still speaka da lingo occasionally

A toy chest in every room in the answer. Toss everything into it at the end of the day and stuff that doesn't fit in gets thrown out. Magic!

I tried flylady but she drove me bonkers, but having spent much of my day ironing as I let it build up, I may give her another go.

thats ok pixiefish it made me laugh

wassy they probably only tidy up when you come iknow i often do then i had (yikes) an unexpected visitor who saw all my knickers drying on the radiator and toys everywhere.

When I appointed my cleaning lady, I used to say to he applicants "We live in a very disorganised house". One woman said "Oh, I'll get you organised in no time". She didn't get the job !!!

Yes post does build up, but it gets dealt with in the end. Catalogues are a bugbear of mine too, esp as one copy sends out price reductions a couple of months after the catalogue, so you have to keep them, don't you?

Life's too short to keep constantly tidying up.

Although we did spend over an hour searching for ds's camera before he went on holiday with BIL's family on Friday night!!

I love "sock audit" we have more of a sock amnisty. My top tip is go to MIL all the time, means you make mess there but feel guilty enough to tidy it up and you don't feel guilty looking at you own. We spend the weekend sailing and bbqing but manage to get all wet gear to land in MIL back garden. Turned up for Sunday lunch to find most stuff washed and hanging up BRILLIANT!

Another tip is to have regular visitors, means you have to keep reasonably tidy. That reminds me I must empty the 3 crates I put on landing when woman came last week and I shoved all the junk from work tops and table into them.

If flylady is too much, make your own system. Give yourself a tour of the house. Decide what needs doing daily (emptying nappy bins, laundry, making beds etc), weekly (cleaning loos, changing beds, quick hoover etc) and what you can get away with doing monthly (proper hoover moving stuff, proper dust, etc). Sort your house into 4 'zones' that you can rotate through each week for the monthly chores (I've got boys bedrooms & main bathroom, our bedroom hall and downstairs loo, lounge study and kitchen dining as my four zones). Have times of day that you do stuff so you don't even think about it - it becomes automatic.

So, for example: in the morning I don't come downstairs until all the beds are made, toys tidied up in the boys bedrooms, nappy bin empty. I take down a load of laundry with me. While dh feeds the kids breakfast I quickly sort out whatever paperwork dumping ground I currently have or sort through emails.

At lunchtime, I make sure the kitchen is cleared up after lunch then do a quick whip round on whatever my weekly chore is for that day while kids are fed and happy - one distracted by telly, the other in bed for a nap (loos on Monday for me - oh joy).

After dinner, I make sure the kitchen is cleaned up again, do a quick whip round on whatever my monthly chore is (my zone is my bedroom this week) while dh picks up all the toys and starts getting the kids ready for bed.

When I go upstairs to bed I make sure that downstairs is all tidy, the kitchen bin is emptied and dishwasher is on.

Surprisingly, it takes much less time than all that writing allows. My house isn't immaculate, but it's passable most of the time

But where do the hours come from? I work part time, do all my own cleaning/washing loking after kids. DH helps at W/E but is generally knackered. If I was a fultime SAHM my house would be neat and tidy as that would be my job.
I am on hols now and generally having too much fun with kids to bother about mess although I did clean my kitchen at 11.30 last night, as we will be out allday today and after reading this thread felt I should do something.
Off to do ironing and tidy up kids rooms.

I have to say one thing.

When your kids grow up, do you want them to look back and say
"Mum was great, we had lots of fun in our childhood, she was always there for us"
OR
"We lived in a very tidy house, mum always seemed to have the vacuum cleaner in her hand"

In the same way that no-one says on their deathbed "I wish I'd spent more time in the office", I don't think anyone says "I wish I'd tidied up more" either.

Honda Dream - I am a SAHM and my house is never tidy - except when someone is due..... clean yes - tidy - well sometimes. The phrase SAHM actually makes me laugh as I am never home and when I am - the two dd's take up my time. Okay they have a clean house - but we have toys over the loungeroom floor and the toys are always played with - we then chuck them in the toy box at night - when dd1 is up - that is it - toys and books out!!

I consider myself fun and the kids make plenty of mess with each activity. But, I do insist that after an activity we tidy away before starting the next thing i.e. if we have been doing clay, we will clear it all away properly before going into the kitchen to bake.

I find mess makes me feel upset and I loose my natural rhythm. As far as paperwork goes, I make absolutely certain to stick all junkmail into recycling straight away and have a folder for the rest which I sort out at month end when I am paying my accounts.

I find that a toyroom works very well - the kids can dump their stuff in there and it doesn't get underfoot. They just bring what they are doing at the time into the living room if they feel like it, it takes 10 minutes before bed to put it all away.

I'm not fanatically tidy but like dejags, too much mess makes me feel 'mentally untidy'. All the same you have to give yourself some leeway when you have small children or you'd go mad.

A brilliant way to get round this is to make one or two rooms havens of tidiness. Me bedroom is off-limits to children and so is very easy to keep it clean and tidy. Two minutes in the morning and two in the evening is enough for day-to-day tidying. When the rest of the house is doing my head in I can escape there.

The other great thing which is really obvious but works wonderfully is this: When tidying always remember that things that are alike in shape take up far less space when you tidy them together. 20 plastic cups - all over the house or in one stack? 20 perfume bottles? Scattered throughout bathrooms and bedrooms or in 1 crate in a cupboard?

Can't bear spending ages searching for things when I should have put them back to the right place in the first place. Really resent it.

Easy-that's exactly my way of thinking.
I used to get really uptight about a messy house but have learnt to relax a bit more .I have a 4 year old and a 2 year old and find it relentless.

It seems other people ie family have a problem with the mess and think i should be concentrating on it more than making things with the children.
There will be plenty of time for housework when they both go to school full time!!!

I want to remembered by my children as they are growing up as a fun mu who was always there for them and did fun things.

Secret of tidiness? Have enough storage space, and make sure that everything has a place to go to. (thats the hard bit)

Then put stuff away regularly. (thats the easy bit)

A have a quote pinned up on my computer and it says

"at the worst, a house unkempt cannot be so distressing as a life unlived"

Yeah !!

This thread is fascinating! I am a very tidy person, and have daily routine to keep it that way-
wake up, put ds on my bed with bottle, tidy round him,lay ds on his bedroom floor while I change his nappy, empty nappy bin and make my bed. I then get dressed. This takes less than an hour.
We then have some play time downstairs. I am happy knowing upstairs is tidy. A couple of hours later ds has a nap, this is my chance to wash up, tidy kitchen, clean downstairs loo etc.

When ds wakes up we can then spend more time together or go out.
I hate to go out and come home to a messy house.
I dont believe this makes me boring or that I spend less time with ds because I am tidying!

I probably spend 1.5-2hrs a day tidying, maybe less. I live in a small 2 bed house and have to keep on top of things, or I would go mad!

The long answer is??????????

I am lucky, I have a cleaner twice a week for 2 hours.

Even still my routine in the morning is as follows.

Round up all the laundry, place it in the laundry basket.

Make the beds.

Pick up anything that I don?t want the cleaner to put away, she has very strange logic and I am still looking for something she tidied away a few months ago. She can?t remember. [rolling eyes needed here]

Downstairs unload the dishwasher, re load the dishwasher.

Unload/reload the washing machine.

Unload/ reload the tumble drier.

Put the laundry into the bag for the ironing lady.

Clean the hob if it needs it, and wipe down all the surfaces

Take all the recyling out to the boxes.

Feed the dog .

Go to work for a rest

I feel that I should add that DH and I do all this together, he used to argue and say oh lets just leave it??????????.He now sees the benefit of it as we never have too much too do at weekends.

The short answer is....................

I am anal when it comes to tidiness.

MGR,

Ditto with having a cleaner. Now that I am back at work I'd be a wreck if my fantastic cleaner didn't help me out.

Not sure I agree with tidy bods secretly being envious of the messy bods. I'm not.

I too have a cleaning lady who has odd logic (and poor eyesight), but is delightful, loves us all, and says how good we are to her, when I pay her each month.

For weeks she kept bringing my wooden shoe horn into the kitchen, I never worked out what she thought it was. We are not allowed to keep deoderant in the bedroom, nor a radio in the bathroom (she always swaps these over).

She once put some root ginger in the breadbin ????

But I couldn't do without her.

Tidyness tip - spend less time on mumsnet!