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?
No, I have adhd and anxiety. Cleaning helps me feel calm.
I wish my anxiety functioned like that. A mess makes me way more anxious but my ADHD tells me evening will take 92 hours so don’t do it.
Now I want adhd. Gimme some :)
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.
I feel this comment! Makes me feel better about the state of things. Entropy, entropy everywhere.
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.
So me and my wife talk about this… Is keeping a small house tidy easier than a large house? We have a 2400 sq ft house as well. I would assume if you had a small house, it’s the same amount of mess, but it’d be more overwhelming because it’s compressed into a smaller space. And clean space would fill up faster. So you’d be cleaning more to at least have some space that’s clean.
As someone who grew up in a house that was definitely too small for a 4-person family, it makes keeping the house decluttered a lot more difficult because there’s just not space to put things away. And god forbid you aquire NEW things, because then you have to shuffle everything around to make a place for it or it just ends up laying around.
Dispersion is the problem. In the last place, there were 2 places the kids could wreck, the living room and their shared bedroomso we could tidy them and it would be presentable… this place? Half dozen easy, plus there’s 2 additional bathrooms, the kitchen is twice the size and the basement is like a soccer pitch sized FFS.
We needed the space, last place wasn’t working so these are good problems to have but it’s definitely more than I anticipated.
I say it depends on the type of people making the mess. I myself can live with a little mess. If it not catastrophic, I might add to it by not putting some stuff away immediately. But at some point, it’s too much, and I’ll be putting things in order as I go, instead of adding more.
But with a bigger place, I can spread it more, so overall more mess can be made before I stop adding more
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.
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.
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.
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.
My dogs would shit themselves if a robot started vacuuming. I mean, they shit themselves when I do it, so I can only imagine…
My cat is less scared of the robot vacuum than regular vacuums. Possibly because it is small and moves in a predictable pattern?
Thats like the worst thing a dog can do around a robot vacuum.
A minute or two each day gos a long way.
It sure dos
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
Preach.
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
You just need to master one rule: designate a place for each item and put them IMMEDIATELY back in their designated place after use.
Yeah, it really helps if you limit the amount of stuff you have in your house and put everything back where it belongs right away.
If you then clean 1/1.5 hours a week you can keep everything relatively clean.
Also like one of the others comments said a robot vacuum can really help limit the dust in your house.
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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.
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No, not really. I’m still learning my way around in Lemmy. I use wefwef.app and just recently the developer has added a subreddit import feature which might be able to find matching communities for you. though didn’t work great for me.
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Same here. btw, I just subscribed to [email protected] , it has over 500 members, so you might want to check it out.
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OP can master that rule today, won’t make a damn bit of difference with a 2 year old around.
haha, yes, all hope is lost there…
Oh yes, this is the path to giving up.
If your 2 year old has access to so much shit then you have bigger issues.
I’m AuDHD. Other half is undiagnosed but probably ADHD. 8 year old is AuDHD. No idea about the three year old. But yeah… our house is either stripped bare if I’ve been on a hyperfocus clean or absolute chaos if neither of us have been
Deebot our robot vacuum has helped a lot. And we are trying to implement some routine but none of us are very good at routine so… 😂
We’ve got a robot hoover, herv but he’s been struggling recently because we’re remodeling our kitchen and the floor is a bit uneven. I’m hoping that he pulls his weight a bit more when the floor is tiled
I have two kids who are 3 years old (they are twins). I accepted that my house can’t be as clean as it used to be without my kids…
No. If my house is not tidy, it disturbs me. I have to clean up.
This is me. Except it’s still not enough to motivate me to do the cleaning. Adhd sucks sometimes.
probably try to change yourself? it’s so common case especially when you have a boy
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.
That’s living with a 2 year old. We had similar situation, but we were able to put little guy to sleep at about 6-7 pm every day. Still we were so tired, that we went to bed around 9-10. But we woke up at 5 am, and we were able to clean before work. Sometimes it was more effective than cup of coffee.
My wife is someone who cannot relax unless they house is pristine. We have a two year old also, and it seems never ending.
Somewhere on a lifehacks post, posted that they set their phone for a 15 minute Timer each day.
I do it on my watch now, silently. Each day. My wife hasn’t caught on to what I’ve been doing. But I can say is I’m having far more sex than ever.
(It’s still never ending, and seems to just shift room to room, but just more manageable)
Look at Mr stud over here lasting a whole 15 minutes !
Hmm. Seems to be taking longer as I age.
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…
I don’t have kids and live alone in Tokyo. Space is limited so keeping things neat and tidy is a must. Also idk I just can’t relax if I know there is still some small housework to be done (dishes, etc.).
If you have two year old I think you can be forgiven for a bit of chaos! Don’t stress.
