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We have 10 guests coming for Christmas dinner and mrsws has made several comments about the state of the hallway coming in to the house. Yes, the place where laddo wheels his bike in on the back wheel every day, the place where the dog shakes the place where dear daughter dumps her bag and shoes.
So I took about giving it a "quick" touch up with paint yesterday, two ****ing hours later I'd fully decorated the hall stairs and landing as the two painted walls stood out like dogs balls 🤣
Roll on the mucky marks!!
Welcome to my life. I get constantly nipped at by Mrs s for the same, she thinks our hoose should be a palace,i think it is well lived in. It's not dirty at all, just used a lot. It is a source of much discussion.
If they take such a dim view of the offending walls tell them to paint it themselves.
A perfect house is a sign of a wasted life.
Paint (or better get someone else to) every few years and a bit of cleaning is the best our house will be.
At least bikes and sailing gear don't come indoors for us.
At least bikes and sailing gear don’t come indoors for us.
The new 'shed" is complete, laddo will be getting a back gate key and that will be his new bike store. Mrsws is very pleased.
No. The wife occasionally asks annoyed 'why is this such a mess ' my reply is always the same 'because we live here' There's a difference between dirty and untidy.
I always get suckered into this illusion, as I did last night. We visited one of Mrs K’s friends for the first time at Christmas. Like us, they have 2 kids off a similar age.
House looked pristine, everything was organised, hubby looked comfortable, jovial and a good entertainer, they had twice the number of telly’s as us and it was Uber-cosy `Christmas decorated.
I returned home as my usual grumpy self, switched on the Christmas tree lights, observed the toys Jr no2 had left all over the floor, the mess on the dining and coffee tables that needs cleaning up before tomorrow, and sank into or 15yo dilapated sofa with something less than pride. These leads to my other post today...
So my answer to the OP is no, but you can polish it a bit and dim the lights when guests come around to hide some of the scars.
With kids & a dog, i accept we're never going to have a 'show' house and I've given up caring/trying. I'll sort it out a bit nicer when they go to uni...maybe
A good family life does take it's toll on a house. I decorated our brand new home when we moved in per kids 18 years ago. By last year it was looking it's age. I've properly redecorate a number of rooms, new radiators, new doors and sockets etc plus new furniture. Missus keeps saying it's like coming into someone else's house, it won't last.
The answer is no. And we haven't got a dog either. Ours is messy, often muddy but the important bits are hygienic I think. Hoovering only seems to deal with the muck for 1/2 a day, so pointless unless just before visitors arrive.
A showroom quality house does not equate to a happy home. I can see the argument to ‘spruce’ (🙄 it is xmas eve) it up for special occasions but you gotta have some scars/marks to show the adventures you’ve had.
Not possible. Don't waste your time trying.
Father of four children and owner of two slightly crazed dogs.
But having as much stuff outside helps a bit.
A nice house needs a dog, kids are ok too imo. Depends on what you think a nice house is I suppose.
The answer to the OPs question is an emphatic No.
And why should it?
And this...
At least bikes and sailing gear don’t come indoors for us.
I have two bedrooms for my “gear” 👍
Impossible! Especially when me and the dog come in from the trails. Dog gets showered in the back garden along with my bike. I come in and strip off in the hallway but mud makes it way every where.
We have a cordless hoover, makes hoovering 5 times a day effortless.
We also made the mistake of cream carpets in the kids rooms, 10 and 11 year old girls, make up and paint all over the floors.
I think it's very much possible if you throw money at the situation (cleaners, decorators, various boot rooms and untility rooms to isolate your inner sanctum from the outside world etc.
The flipside obviously is that to earn all this money youll probably never be home to enjoy any of it.
Definately a balance to be struck IMHO
My brother lives in an old manse just outside Nairn. Its a beautiful big house and he has a dog and two mad kids. They don't spend inordinate amounts of time fixing and cleaning. The dog stays outside a lot which helps i reckon!
Maybe the more space you have the easier it becomes!
My sister's house is pristine -no kids, no animals, and at work all the time and have my mum clean for them (late 40's). Both don't have any messy hobbies - him golf, her gym.
Us, two kids (teens), 4 cats. Lots of hobbies - wife craft/sewing etc, me bikes - at least my bikes are in the garage.
We have a close friend that literally has no clutter, but she has no hobbies and her daughter is a late teen now, but they were the same when hubby was around (he left for a younger model).
PS - diluted screwfix degreaser is blooming great on walls/paintwork without damaging that rubbish water based gloss/matt woodwork paint. Just rescued the internal doors by using that stuff, otherwise a full repaint.
3 boys a dog two cats tropical fish and guinea pigs .. I'm going with no 😀
Add in Lego, guitars, bikes etc. and it's a recipe for continual redecoration
Still at least it feels like a home rather than some of the sterile boxes I've visited.
The other word is home or house ?
Own your house, don't have it own you.
Anyone who is going to criticise the way you keep your house isn't a friend. Never invite people who are not friends to your house.
Problem solved.
No, but as an increasingly tidy person I don’t see why mess is required.
Mr SO and daughter are both enormously untidy, to the point where it feels like 25% of every weekend is devoted to mucking out the shit they leave everywhere. That’s a wasted life - the minimal free time we have spent tidying up when it’s no more effort to put things away immediately after use.
Me (I’m like that kid in Charlie Brown with his own dust cloud), two dogs and 6 Ferrets means that our house has never looked pristine, We keep it clean as we can but decorating is just not worth it! The freshly painted stuff will soon get the edges knocked off it!
If they take such a dim view of the offending walls tell them to paint it themselves.
Perhaps not as confrontational as that, but I do find that if 'we' have a problem with something at home, it becomes less of a problem if we have to fix it.
My wife said without a hint of irony the other day "if I don't nag nothing gets done" as if the concept of doing something herself was completely alien.
Our house is very dusty, significantly more so than any other house I've lived in, it would be a full time job keeping it pristine. Just a case of keeping it mostly at bay.
Definitely the size/type of house matters. We're lucky as we have a garage and a separate entrance to the rear garden as I can remember as a kid our house only had the one entrance with no hallway and my mom was forever mopping and hoovering to keep on top of the detritus I would bring in. No dog in our house but we would reconsider this once the kids are old enough to help look after one.
We don't have carpets in the lounge, kitchen, bathrooms and dining rooms which I think also definetly help keep the house looking tidy-ish.
Agree a home should look like people actually live there.
If I had my own house (literally just for me) it would be a stone bothy type with flagstone flooring, bare stone walls and a wood burning stove with high back chairs around it. Might get one, one day. 🤞
Yes , it’s entirely possible.... but you need extra rooms
3 kids, one dog, one nice house.
We contain the mess to certain rooms and leave others in a constant state of immaculate readiness. Mostly this is because it,s nice to retreat to these sanctuaries of genteel normality to escape the screaming whirlwind of aforementioned kids and dogs but it also comes in handy if unexpected visitors pop round and you can just shut a few doors and lead them in without them suspecting the chaos that lies beneath the appearance of tranquil tidiness that they are allowed to behold.
Oh, and for tidier kids just designate a tidy up their room day twice a week.
Yeah, that would work wouldn't it?
But you're not asking them to tidy up after themselves, you're going to do it.
Oh, nearly forgot - it's important to tell them that they can leave anything that's for out on the floor.
Got to do it ruthlessly though. You'll only have to do it a couple of times... 🙂
they had twice the number of telly’s as us
was it a council house? 😉
The only person I know with kids and a pristine house doesn't have time to take her kids out places at the weekends because she has too many jobs to do. Nuts to that...
My missus is simultaneously the biggest complainer and offender when it comes to the state of our home.
Yesterday was a prime example, she was fussing because she'd invited some of her friends over and there was stuff left lying about, she proceeded to sort some left over boxes from the move which are still in our bedroom...
Two hours later our bedroom was actually worse, and I'd cleared the hall kitchen and lounge (where she was actually going to have her friends)...
This scenario will be repeated several times over the next two weeks.
The kids just leave their toys everywhere which is easily addressed with threats to bin all offending items, and our cat is pretty tidy compared to most pets...
It's mainly the boss who creates a mess then whinges that it's not tidy.
We keep our home clean(ish) but would rather spend our free time enjoying hobbies and having quality time with the kids rather than constantly cleaning and decorating.
The clutter does annoy me sometimes though.
My missus is simultaneously the biggest complainer and offender when it comes to the state of our home.
Mrs K is nearing th end of a whirlwind cleaning session. Our house is very presentable now, although I've just been moaned at for sitting on the computer with a beer, after working this morning, replacing some sealant around the bath and hour on the turbo trainer, unpacking and setting up and re-hiding Jnr's Whyte 403 Christmas present, extending the table ready for tomorrows dinner, and pretty much doing everything as asked...
And as above, she's the messy one. I'm less comfortable with mess and tend to see everything put away.
Having been invited through many many maried women's pristine houses to the bedroom while their husband's out working and the kids are at School I can honestly say every last one of them is mental.
so are dog owners though.
we have two labradors. there isn't a surface in the whole house that doesn't have black hair on it. at all. we dont have kids but when the nephews come round its like a bomb has gone off so i would say the answer to the question is, no. no chance.
2 kids, small dog.
Yes to having a nice house but a few musings...
Basically, as above regarding putting stuff away. If the place is tidy then cleaning takes a fraction of the time. Constantly putting stuff away is my biggest bugbear. It’s actually easier to put stuff away most of the time.
Keeping the lounge clean & nice is important. As someone said, it’s the sanctuary, somewhere kept nice for relaxing away from the madness. My two leave their rubbish lying around in there at their peril.
Dog...a couple of old towels by the door for wiping paws on. Keep the lawn short, even in winter. If you can, a canopy over the door or even better, a roofed veranda so that you have a dry area outside the door is a bonus. As much as my wife hates it, I put down one of those proper industrial/ commercial threshold matts. It’s a bit larger so shows & boots can be removed & left on it.
Two kids (four and one) and sadly no dog at the moment. We did have a Newfoundland. House is lived in and will get tidied when the kids are older. In the meantime I’m slowly learning to live with (and embrace) the chaos. Resisting would lead to a meltdown.
Not a chance. There's only one room here with any semblance of order, my room for bikes and kit. Kids, dog and especially wife are not allowed in unsupervised.
We have four cats, all the carpets and sofas look like someone has taken an angle grinder to them! The kitchen floor always has hundreds of muddy paw prints whenever it's wet outside. Not a lot of point trying to do anything about it...
A wise man* once said, “why bother with dusting, after a while, the dust doesn’t get noticeably thicker”.
*Quentin Crisp, I believe.
2 teenagers and a cat. We’ve finally found a decent cleaner, who is happy to tidy and clean. The house has never looked better - but it just exaggerates the bits that need decorating 🙄
It’s kind of doable...
We have a four year old and a dog and our house isn’t too bad. The mess left behind by the boy and my other half do my head in the most (she’s probably the worst offender). The dog is very hairy so he’s a pain in the wet weather and shakes in the hall. At the moment we just have Lego creations all over the place and none of them can be dismantled!
2 kids (8 and 10) and a 9 week old puppy.
I'm refusing to buy anything until we're out of the chewing stage.
That being said we moved from a small 3 bed to a much bigger 5 bed house this year and we are much more presentable now as we have enough space now and the clutter has been kept in check to a certain extent.
That being said it's battle as the wife likes to leave piles of junk on the surfaces in the kitchen.
Nope.
We live 3 miles from the beach.
Have 3 kids under 10.
2 labradors.
2 cats.
Bikes, mud, kids, dogs, sand, dirt, hair etc = daily battle.
Entropy is slowly winning
I’m refusing to buy anything until we’re out of the chewing stage.
Kids or puppy?
A perfect house is a sign of a wasted life warped and disturbed mind!.
It's a home and should have some scars.
2 teenagers and 2 cats. So untidy and trashed. We got 2 leather sofas delivered and within a fortnight the cats had absolutely destroyed them by using them as scratching posts. And every teenager knows that you should never put something in the bin when you can drop it down the side of your chair instead
I can’t really talk though. The dining room invariably has one of my bikes in, with an assortment of parts and tools
You can have a nice, clean, tidy house if it's just you and two cats.
After moving all my stuff out to rent my flat out on AirBnB, I re-painted everything and have re-arranged every single cupboard and drawer in my house. The final one was to re-do the "cupboard of tupperwares, random plastic containers and old jars" on Christmas Eve morning. Felt amazing.
The rest of y'all are just making excuses 😉
Like I said "a warped and twisted mind" your guitarhero 🙂
I don't have kids but do have a dog.
We keep our house as immaculate as we can. It cost a lot of money for us and I like to get some comfort from keeping it nice.
I do loads of biking, swimming and running. I run my own business but still like to spend a lot of lazy time cleaning up.
It would be much harder with children.
I'm not any more deranged or less outdoors enthusiastic that anyone else on here and sure OCD does kick in but it's nice to be in a clean and tidy environment.
Keeping it spot on can be a draining task though.
A lot of people I know seem to let things go to pot, and there is a lot of can't be arsed involved. That's not necessarily a smart move either. For instance mate didn't cut his hedge eventually the hedge got that big the wall fell over.
He's left that too.
Well, I told a lie.
Elderly relatives are worse. Having non-carpeted floors seems to be carte blanche to traipse in whatever shite is on your shoes and not bother to remove them (or even ask) at the door.
Cue scrubbing an odd combination of show polish and steam train soot of my lovely Amtico floor.