I feel like my house is constantly a fucking mess. My wife and I work 80 hours between us and we have a 2 year old and I feel like it’s constantly a mess.
We do what we can and often spend a couple hours on a weekend tidying but it’s a losing battle.
How do you cope/keep on top of things?
My robot vacuum really helped with this. It runs every day while at work, which forces me to pick stuff up and make sure it won’t get stuck somewhere.
Got me into the habit and by now it’s second nature. Before I leave the house I do a quick check/clean, which takes a minute or two at most.
And then you have the obvious benefits in getting the apartment vacuumed.
A minute or two each day gos a long way.
It sure dos
Damn I thought I was the only one haha. My robot vacuum also forces me to keep my place relatively tidy so it doesn’t get stuck.
I can certainly see there being a habit aspect to it, and once it’s tidy as you say it’s a minute or two to keep it that way.
Do you have different floors to your house?
I could see it helping with the ground floor but still neglecting the bedroom level, etc
Live in an apartment, so that definitely helps. It tidied the floor in every room. But honestly, it’s not so much the vacuum, more so the habit of cleaning a minute or two when I leave the home.
As well as picking stuff up when I’m done with them obviously.
My dogs would shit themselves if a robot started vacuuming. I mean, they shit themselves when I do it, so I can only imagine…
Thats like the worst thing a dog can do around a robot vacuum.
My cat is less scared of the robot vacuum than regular vacuums. Possibly because it is small and moves in a predictable pattern?
Yep. Depression paints in broad strokes and has degraded my ability to clean, keep schedules, etc. Not fun.
My wife and I got the idea that our home is cluttered and messy because we have not one, but two toddlers. Twins. Not so much because of the mess they make (although that certainly adds to it), but because we have zero time to deal with it while they are awake, and when they finally sleep we are completely EXHAUSTED.
But reading these comments from parents of single children honestly made me feel a lot less bad about it. So thanks for that, fellow clutterers.
Yes. Same situation as you but a 3 year old. I gave up on the stuff my kid yeets everywhere and focus on dishes/kitchen/vacuuming. Then once every couple weeks I go on a rampage and pick up everything when I can’t take it any longer…
You just need to master one rule: designate a place for each item and put them IMMEDIATELY back in their designated place after use.
OP can master that rule today, won’t make a damn bit of difference with a 2 year old around.
If your 2 year old has access to so much shit then you have bigger issues.
Aristotlian theory of natural place 💪💪
It’s very interesting indeed. A while ago I read Carl Popper’s Open Society and it’s Enemies. In that book he argues that Plato and to some extent Aristotle have developed underlying philosophical tools to support, for a lack of better term, “closed” societies. For example slaves rather remain slaves, farmers remain farmers, and rulers remain rulers. He argues that they contribute to a totalitarianism, and undermine democracy by discouraging being equal and in general “change”.
Take all this with a grain of salt, since it’s a while I’ve read the book, so can’t articulate it better. But your comment reminded me of all this, so I thought it might be interesting for you and other readers.
ps: I personally think there is no natural place for things, that’s us, sentient beings, who define that and give things meanings.
Similar hours, no kids but 2 dogs and 2 cats.
A Roomba and a housekeeper once a month to do the big things (dust, bathrooms, floors). Worth every penny.
I think having an isolated area for kids toys or an easy to dump bucket to throw everything in would probably help the chaos that I see in other parents’ homes but as a childfree person I’m the last who should give advice on that so feel free to laugh and ignore that idea.
A robo vacuum only seems silly until you have a decent one. Then it’s noticeable how good it is.
Good luck getting a toddler to only play with things in a designated area. They are a full force of nature. I do have a basket or toy bin in each room to shove stuff in but it always comes right back out.
We really went minimal after our fourth kid. Too many toys, too much of everything. We don’t need 3 whisks, or 4 blankets, or 6 duvet covers, or 4 spatulas.
We now have a fairly minimalist house, with the exception toys, but here we do weekly rotation, leaving most of it boxed up in the garage and only some out. They kids think they get new toys when some of their old stuff reappears.
Yes. I have depression and I struggle everyday to keep things decent enough. Doing the dishes everyday is been my long battle. I am trying the strategy of putting a minimum time of doing the dishes everyday (five minutes). Usually it’s enough for me to clean all the dishes in a day. Once a month, a person comes to help me clean. This makes me clean as well before, so I don’t burden them.
I recently found out I had ADHD, which explained a lot imo.
BUT, you have a kid. Who has a kid and a tidy house? Rich MFers who get there home cleaned weekly ig
It makes me wonder if anyone really has a clean house or I only really go to my parents/in-laws house and they have only themselves to clean up after
I’ve found the only people I know who have clean houses are: people without kids, people with house cleaners, people who’s mental health issues make them want to clean. Everyone else just apologizes for their mess and moves on.
I don’t have kids and never will, I live alone in avarage european flat, yet I still struggle to keep it at least managable. I like having it clean, I just hate cleaning
Sounds like you need a cleaner
No, I don’t struggle, because I feel no compulsion to keep it tidy in the first place :)
We have a sign in our home. “Cleaning a house while kids are growing is like shoveling while it’s still snowing.”
We have a cleaning day once a week. Other than that, we let it be other than daily kitchen duty.
It’s a lot easier to shovel a foot of snow thrice than it is to shovel 3 feet of snow that’s compacted, melted down a bit, formed a freezing layer on top and ice on the bottom, and now your shovel is broke because you were trying to pry up that ice with 60lb of snow on top of it.
But at that point you say fuck it and just pay a guy to swing by with his plow and throw out some salt.
I appreciate the sentiment though.
Yes. I have a husband and a 16 year old autistic son (unfortunately he is very low functioning and does not really help with any chores because of that, despite his age).
My husband works 5 to 6 days a week, usually 12 hour shifts, sometimes if there’s a 6th day it’s 8 hours. I work 8-5, 5 days a week, but also have about a 45 minute commute one way.
Husband also has a large family and we have a pool, so right now at least one weekend day is usually spent hosting them for swimming.
My best strategy right now is that if I walk by something that needs doing and will take a few minutes or less to complete (think throwing away some trash, tidying the coffee table, grabbing all the dishes in the room and moving them to the sink), then I do it right then. It’s not perfect and it doesn’t take care of everything, but I’m hoping if I do it more, I’ll be able to sort of stack things and do two things at once that need doing and then cleaning will become part of my routine.
But honestly I’m mostly here to get tips because my ADHD brain needs help.
Moved from 1000sqft to 2400 and all hope was lost.
With 2 kids under 5 and a couple of pets, I literally can’t clean fast enough to make a dent.
Bathrooms and kitchen are clean… the rest belongs to the animals.
Wow, I can feel the despair trough the text.
I only have a cat and I’m already at my limit, u have my respect.
