Why My House is Messy

I know my house is messy. I’m not a good housekeeper. I never have been, and neither was my mother. I know she would have recognized herself in Claire McCarthy’s Huffington Post piece.* Also, there’s this.

I do want my house to be clean. It’s so much more peaceful and comfortable when it is. Mr. Sandwich and I agree on this (For the record, if you come over to our house? He’s the one who cleaned it for you.) And we really want to have people over, but we’d feel so much better about it if we were more orderly.

messy kitchen table
This is our kitchen table after Mr. Sandwich has taken some stuff off of it.

And, honestly, “orderly” is key here. We have too much stuff, and we have no organization system. But there aren’t dirty dishes lying around (seriously, I feel like I am always washing dishes), and the laundry is either clean or in the hamper (Mr. Sandwich is always doing laundry). We’re neither hoarders nor a hotbed of disease.

So is your house clean? I’d probably love being there. But if it’s a mess, I’m probably cool with that, too. Because I’m not visiting you for your house, I’m visiting you because it’s fun. So if I’m not judging you, why am I judging myself? You can schedule a consultation for low maintenance draperies or in-home covering from rescomdesigns.com.

*That Dutch saying quoted in the comments? Yeah, the Dutch are a nation of people who leave their curtains open so you can peer in their windows and see how clean their houses are. My mother-in-law is Dutch. She’s the loveliest person, and yet she still can’t hide that my housekeeping pains her.

12 thoughts on “Why My House is Messy

  1. We have different levels of messiness. We try to keep our living room very organized/clean. Our kitchen is hit or miss — just too much going on. Our bedroom is not cluttered but looks lived in. bathroom gets clean often but varies. Kids’ rooms are a mess.

  2. I am so glad that someone else can’t manage to keep their house neat. My grandmother was a neat freak ( if you put a glass down and looked the other way, when you looked back your glass would be gone), and I often feel bad about what she would think if she were alive and saw my house. And, I do have dishes in the sink most of the time. I’ve thought about getting a maid, but I would have to pick up the clutter for her to get to the carpet or anything she might clean, and I just don’t have time for that. The laundry is endless with 4 children, and there is always a pile of it waiting to be folded and put away. That’s what I spend my life doing. Well, that and taxiing my oldest daughter everywhere. I would like a neat, clean house, but it just seems endless and overwhelming, as well as frustrating when I try to tackle a big cleaning project and within a day it looks just like it did before I started.
    But you already knew I was messy in college.
    I just don’t know which child to stop feeding or changing so that I have time to clean. Do these people with children and spotless homes lock their kids in the basement all day, or what?

    1. I don’t remember you being all that messy, but maybe that’s because we had that in common then, too. Of course, we all had to limit what we brought, with six of us in the room.

  3. Yeah, that’s pretty much us – we are clean, but cluttered. And you’re right – it’s about too much stuff. We’re working on that. Slowly but surely…
    And is it just me or does the stuff just seem to multiply magically all by itself?

  4. I so struggle with this – and keep working on it (mostly by purging crap I haven’t used in years) but now instead of my crap all over it’s the baby’s. Ah, well. Better to fix one issue than have two rivaling issues duking it out, right? There are so many more important things to do than clean – as long as we surround ourselves with real people who understand that, we’re good. 🙂

    1. For me, it’s more about the peace of mind and the ability to find things. For example, right now I cannot find the sunglasses I was going to send to daycare with Baguette for Share Day. I do not have an innate love of cleaning.

  5. My house is seldom clean, though, thankfully, Duffy has a lower threshold of “something needs to be done,” so we’re never walking around in the pure filth that we might be, were I the “lead cleaner.”

    In the areas that guests might frequent, I try to keep “easily tidyable,” just to give the illusion of clean, should someone that hasn’t ever been to my house be expected.

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