Project: Stop living in filth and also get rid of some stuff

[feuervogel]

Ben and I are very lazy people. Neither of us is particularly fond of cleaning the house. We tend to give the living room a thorough (relatively speaking) cleaning only when we're having a party, which hasn't happened in a goodly time, mainly because of a lack of funds to throw one.

We have cats, as you know. This means our carpets (wall to wall in 80% of the house) are basically covered in cat litter and cat hair. It's pretty gross. I'd like to replace the 11-year-old, cat-puke-stained carpet with laminate flooring, but there's no money for that. (We'll need to before we sell the house, because apparently you can't sell houses with nasty carpeting. I'd like to do it soon enough that we can actually enjoy said new flooring, but, well, income. I have none.)

So Friday afternoon I vacuumed downstairs and the bottom half of the stairs. I moved furniture and everything. Then Saturday, Ben and I finished the stairs, and I did the upstairs, digging out the mini shampooer to go over some pee spots. Irritatingly, the main vacuum doesn't have attachments, so we have to dig out a broom vac (the kind for wood floors or industrial carpeting) that does so we can get against the walls and in the corners.

So my goal now is to vacuum every other week at least, because the floors were really gross. And maybe we can make some headway into getting out the ancient layers of cat hair in the carpets.

I've got a very low tolerance for clutter, which, let me tell you, makes living with Ben really difficult at times. He never gets rid of anything. Judging by the probably 25-years'-worth collection of magazines in his parents' basement, I'm guessing it's genetic.

Our closet is overcrowded, you can't see the floor for boxes and piles (that are at least half his stuff) in the bonus room, and it's driving me up the wall. I've got a couple boxes full of things for either charity or a yard sale that just need to go (clothes & shoes mostly), but I can probably get a couple more easily. I'd like to convince Ben to help out, get rid of some of his things, but I've pretty much given up on that ever happening, or happening to an extent such that it makes a lick of difference. (He's going to have to make some really hard decisions if he moves with me to Berlin. We'll have half as much space as we do now at *MOST*, and I'll be damned if he's going to get 80% of it to keep his random papers from 7th grade and every card he's ever gotten, plus his toys. Yes, I find it rather frustrating that I'm getting rid of, or have gotten rid of, a fairly significant amount of things, and he's barely gotten rid of anything, and has, in fact, gotten MORE things.)

So, anyway. I'd like to start tackling the house room by room, saying keep or sell to everything. I'd also like to be able to walk through the bonus room to get to my bookshelf, but the 3 boxes of MORE THINGS from his parents house that have arrived since Christmas are in the middle of the fucking floor, in front of the tons of crap that's been sitting there for years. I'm just plain sick of it. (And if he's seriously considering putting the air mattress in the bonus room so my mom can sleep there, he needs to get all that shit out so there's space for it. And sell those motherfucking MAGIC cards already. They've been here ... two years now? Three? And he promised to sort them and sell valuable ones before he had his parents ship them here. All 24 pounds of them, which doesn't include the binder that holds the last deck he made.)

I made some progress in sorting memorabilia from traveling by putting postcards into photo sleeves and things like that. I'd like to scan the millionty photo albums that are sitting around in boxes, but there are a ton of them, and it'll take forever. Also, a lot of the photos are really shit, from my cheapo, no-focus 110-mm camera that I had from 3rd-10th grade. So, fun and a lot of sorting. Except they're in the back corner of the bonus room, and I can't really get them *out* of the bonus room without hurting myself.

My scanner also does negatives, so I could do some of those while I'm at it. I wonder where the Photoshop Elements CD that came with the scanner is. Last I saw it, Ben was installing it on his iMac. I also wonder if it'll work on my laptop anyway. It's installed on my Mini, but I almost never use that. (And PSE has a tendency to crash if you look at it funny.)

I want to go through my closet and get rid of clothes I never wear or that don't fit well or that are just 15 years out of style. I have so many t-shirts, and I wear... 5? 8? I don't want to get rid of many work clothes, just in case I get a real job again and need to look presentable. I have way more clothes than I need.

My sewing room terrifies me, but I need to get in there and sort that wreck out. I'll save it till last. I can't do anything to the bonus room, because most of what's in there isn't mine, and as much as I'd like to say "tough shit" and pitch it, I can't.

We are both lazy people, and every little organizational trick I've tried to keep the kitchen table from being a stack of papers with no room to eat has failed. We just leave things on tables, counters, the floor, wherever we decide to set them down, and they stay there until I get pissed off enough by the clutter to force Ben to pick up his shit while I pick up mine. I'd really love it if I didn't have to clean an entire room to find one thing I was looking for, but that's never going to happen.

Comments

[picklish]

Clutter is *so* hard to fight against, even when you want to get rid of it. Stuff expands to fill available space, and often the only answer is to just have less space. Even with less room where we live now, I'm still half-tempted to get rid of most of our dead tree books, a large part of my wardrobe, and most of my old photos (provided I scan them first).

I often find it's helpful for me to explicitly have spaces where clutter is not ok (i.e. coffee table) and spaces where clutter is ok (i.e. my own desk), and I arbitrarily transfer things from one to the other as needed. Sure, the clutter is still there somewhere, but the feeling of having a clutter-free living room makes a huge difference for my mental health.

[feuervogel]

I'm so attached to my books! I have some that I read and enjoyed well enough, but they're not my favorites, but they were gifts, so I feel bad getting rid of them... Even if they were all available in epub, I'd probably still keep a fair portion of them.

I keep trying to explain to Ben that it's a psychological need for me to have order, but he doesn't seem to get it. I'm glad I'm not the only person who finds that clutter makes them upset.

[ranyart]

Oof. We got rid of so much stuff when we moved and I still wish I'd pared things down more; that certainly helps to cut down on clutter. I am not a *messy* person but it can be tough for me to combat clutter. So I feel your pain!

We just replaced the entire upstairs carpet when we moved; poor Shenny threw up and missed her litterbox enough times that we knew it was beyond saving.

[feuervogel]

I'm willing to yard sale a damn lot of stuff. Ben, OTOH... Especially because "sort through these 10 boxes of things taking up half the bonus room, including the one that could get me a couple hundred bucks if I sold some of these cards*" rates on his priority scale well below "read all the forums" and "play video games."

*He could finance the ticket he got a few weeks ago by selling 4 or 5 of his double lands.

We're going to have to replace the door to my sewing room and the carpet around there, and hopefully not the floorboards, because Claire and/or Luna have decided that it's theirs, and they need to mark it. Repeatedly. (Seriously, the paint is curling on the bottom of the door.) I don't want to replace the door *soon* because they'll just pee on it again.

[a-nightengale.livejournal.com]

This entry could totally have been written about paulcory and me, except with the genders reversed -- I'm more of a pack-rat that Paul is, though he's somewhat of one, too.

After we put our two seventeen-year-old cats to sleep last year, we borrowed a friend's carpet shampooer and did the living room floor with it. I'm right there with you on wanting to replace the carpet. I can't even tell you what color ours is anymore, except "stained."

What I did with a bunch of my T-shirts that I don't wear but didn't want to toss--sent them to a lady on Etsy who made a memory quilt for me. It doesn't necessarily take up less space than the shirts themselves, but at least it's on the bed, providing cover and serving a function.

Paul and I are both prone to what we call "flat surface disorder," where any flat surface, and some non-flat ones, get covered in paper and daily debris. The kitchen table is the worst, but any surface is prone to be used.

[feuervogel]

Flat surface disorder. I like that. It's very appropriate!

I think laminate flooring would be easier to take care of-just swiffer it to get up the cat hair & litter! And, while it wouldn't make it so Ben's brother could stay over, people who are less allergic might be able to come by with less trouble, because there's not a ton of hair ground into the carpet.

[beth_leonard]

Our carpet used to be Really Bad. Perhaps not as bad as 11 years with cats, but 12 years of twice-yearly vacuuming had left their marks. Getting (and using) a steam cleaner made a huge difference, not like new, but from "I feel gross every time I go from the front door to the kitchen" to "this carpet is warn but serviceable." Unfortunately, after another month or two it would be quite bad again in the high-traffic areas.

After Amber was born, we bought an iRobot Roomba and programmed it to run 3x/week. The regular vacuuming made a huge difference in keeping the carpet looking nice. Not only did it force us to pick up the floor 3x/week, which kept that from deteriorating, but the carpet stayed looking nice for 9-12 months at a time instead of 2.

Just saying, the regular vacuuming sounds like a good strategy. I have no good plan for the clutter because it eats our house too. It's just less important to me than other things, except when I'm looking for something I can't find. And every time I do de-clutter, I get annoyed that it becomes *harder* to find things, because I know my tape measure had been sitting right in that pile in the corner over there, and now I've gone and put it away, and I have no clue where it really is.

--Beth

[feuervogel]

We have a few designated areas for things like tools, and they usually end up where they belong. Our tape measure is neon green, so it's easy to spot in the handful of places it usually ends up (unless something's on top of it.)

I think in our case, the only solutions to clutter are going to be physically removing it from the house and forcing Ben to sort his crap into tidy boxes and binders. Which is at the bottom of his priority list (way below things like "reading my internet forums" and "maintaining my tumblr" and "playing video games").

[beth_leonard]

A strategy some of my friends use (usually with their children, but I suppose it could apply to spouses) is "15 minute cleaning time." Set the kitchen timer for 15 minutes, once a day at a time that works for the family, and then during those 15 minutes, clean vigorously. Don't stop to read decades-old magazine articles, just clean effectively for those 15 minutes. When the timer is up, stop, and stop feeling guilty that you're doing something other than cleaning. On weekends, do it every 2-4 hours.

I don't know if it would work for you guys, but it's another tool in the toolbox. For some kids, getting them to do something they don't want to do for even 5 minutes is an impossibility, unless they know it's only going to be for 5 minutes. Once they gain the skill at 5 minutes of concentration, you work up the duration.

--Beth