Quote:
Originally Posted by sugar rose
kat999 - thanks for sharing. Between you and your husband, which one of you has more tolerance for clutter? How do you differ in your ideas of what constitutes clutter?
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So both of us are slightly messy and also slightly tidy in different ways. I want all the rooms in the house to look as tidy as a hotel room does when you first check in: everything squared away where it belongs, no piles of papers or books anywhere, just free of stuff on the floor or in stacks. I'm a big fan of appropriate and attractive storage. However, I tend to be weirdly blind to dust, grime, or the need to deep clean various surfaces and areas (e.g., I'm always shocked when I vacuum at how much hair and dust are in the canister, because to me I can't tell that the carpet is dull if there are no obvious stains on it). My husband is the opposite: he is blind to piles of books, papers, magazines, things not put away after use, but he will often do dishes before I even have a chance to get to them and is always the one encouraging us to clean sinks and counters and vacuum. You would think this would make us compatible, but what happens is we both get frustrated with the other person and then it all sinks down to the lowest tolerable level for both of us. We both work a LOT (and WFH a fair amount; he's at home all week and I'm home three days a week), so I think what happens is we dirty the home more than if we were gone 40 hours/week, but our exhausting jobs make it so we're not keen on spending all weekend cleaning. When we do deep cleaning rather than just tidying up, though, we really go all in. We also tend to keep our downstairs "presentable" so no one who comes over is quite aware at how not great the upstairs is.
Anyway, it's a very, very hard struggle. My dream when housing prices stabilize is to sell our slightly-too-big-for-us home and downsize to a condo that's easier to keep clean.