After ruminating on other people’s home activities I’ve overheard, I decided that we at Chez Lauren are straight up lazy. Or rather, I am straight up lazy. And distracted. It boggles that somebody is compelled to vacuum their house EVERY DAY, but then I know that as someone with three cats, it would do us well to vacuum every day. A woman I work with owns three houses, renting out two, and after working a long day with a significant amount of overtime goes home to take care of her five teenage children, paints rooms, moves furniture, does lawn care, and whatever else people with three houses requiring maintenance do. I can barely work up the energy to blog.
After going over a mental checklist in my head, it appears that Chef and Ethan even do more, or more frequent, housework than I do. Ethan earns his allowance in part by sorting the laundry and keeping his room clean, and that’s something that I have him do almost every day that he’s here. And Chef, who is a chef by trade obviously, has been cursed with all things kitchen, since I rarely cook and when I do it involves one spatula, one pan, and one bowl, and when he cooks it involves all available kitchenware within a one mile radius, in addition to every clean kitchen towel we own. I half-heartedly do a few loads of laundry over the week and try to tidy up the primary living areas, but I still find myself sneering at piles of mail and piles of poo in the litterbox.
In my mind, I have way better things to do with my free time. It used to be a political thing, that I refused to take on the majority of house work merely because I was a woman and that’s just what women do. But when your friends come over to visit and seek out the Windex and vacuum cleaner to do this stuff for you, they send a strong message.
I still blame my propensity to ignore my mess on a mixture of ADD, working lots of overtime, and general disinterest, but after going on four years in this house, we really have to get a hold on things. How the hell do people keep on top of this?
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ALSO: After writing this, I went to clean up part of the kitchen out of guilt and determination, saw the pictorial documentation of my mother’s gall bladder surgery from Monday, not limited to my mother’s working insides as they operated on her, stuck the sheet in a magazine, and returned to the computer.
I’ve been in the process of cleaning house for the past couple weeks. The Partner and I have been at this location for roughly four years, also, and shit has been stacking up and ending up boxed in the basement without further contemplation.
As you’ve been privy to, I’ve never been one to keep a clean house. *Ahem*
I believe part of it is due to my upbringing—my mother is such a clean freak, I think it borders on an OCD. Growing up, she was always on my ass to clean my room daily, something I just couldn’t justify. I have thus come to have an extreme aversion to cleaning, while my mom is still one of those who vacuums daily.
The things is, it’s hard to live messy when you’re sharing living space with another person.
So I’m cleaning. Four days ago I vacuumed the office. I couldn’t remember the last time that happened. I’m thinking of making a weekly list—such as having Sunday (after the Breakfast Jamboree) be a cleaning day. I’m sure keeping on top of everything is much, much easier than having to go psycho for weeks at a time.
I recently got my apartment clean so I could sell it. And it took me three weeks to do it (ADD? Why, yes. Ooh, shiny). It helped immensely that I had a goal (open house in three weeks!) somewhat of a plan (do not try to clean/declutter everything at once; try to clear and clean one surface/shelf/drawer at a time), and two weeks during which I was unemployed. Without all of those, I don’t know what I would have done.
However, once it is clean and decluttered, it’s not at all hard to keep that way. I’m really astonishing myself with this.
My horrible habit is just not cleaning or tidying during the academic calendar. In the summertime, it’s not as big of a problem but in fall and spring, phew. With five furballs, this means I live with the lint roller. And by May we eat standing up or sitting on the bed because the kitchen table is so full of books and papers.
Zuzu, I loved reading your progress reports… you give me hope.
Oh, god I hope someone answers you so I can do it too. I like to think that it’s my roommates that are the problem, but it’s probably not.