So, the wife decided thing needed to be tidy. Now no one can find the putty knife.

If she was a squirrel, she wouldn’t make it through the first winter.

Why would a squirrel need a putty knife?

Might be a wife thing. I’m definitely the messy one but it’s because I want to put things away where they are supposed to go (which often means they get left out). She just tidies things away. You then have to guess where ‘away’ is. I regularly find all sorts of random stuff and fail to find the thing I’m looking for.

She must know MrsSalmon!

“I’ve tidied up” apparently means “I’ve moved piles of crap around the house as a pointless time filling exercise” in our house too!

Yep, I’m down a pedal spanner that has been put away though god knows where.

The wife also tidy’s away screws and nuts and bolts into the bin. Last time we had the oven professionally cleaned they left one of the nuts next to the oven for the window. Spotted when I got him from work. Went to get changed to fix, came back downstairs and it had been tidied away. Still yet to find….

top tip: don’t ever let your mum do the dishes. Mine insisted on doing so after we had them round for Sunday lunch.

I’ve not been able to find anything in the kitchen since 😥

I tend to leave stuff where I know I can find it. It tends to stay there right up until the day I need it, and when I go to get it I discover, without fail, that it has now been relocated to some hitherto uncharted corner of the universe in the interests of tidiness. When the inevitable question and answer session begins, Mrs Scape will insist that she has a completely logical train of thought in deciding where stuff should now live. Unfortunately that logic is at a wide variance to mine. (or anybody else’s)

top tip: don’t ever let your mum do the dishes. Mine insisted on doing so after we had them round for Sunday lunch.

I’ve not been able to find anything in the kitchen since

Genuine lol there from me. Has happened to me 3 times by the Mother in law, who of course, has diplomatic immunity on such crimes. I have to suffer in silence when I need to peel potatoes. Its not right.

My OH does this!

Teabags, they live near the kettle because she drinks tea.

Cups live nearby (after a lot of arguing).

Coffee, that has to live in the larder at the oppsite end of the kitchen.

Coffee machine, in corner all of its own, nowhere near the coffee, fridge, sink or kettle.

Espresso cups live in the cupboard with the measuring jugs, not glassware or mugs?

I finally won the argument that peelers and knives lived in the drawer under the worktop, not by the cooker that the end, and spatulas vice versa. 🙂

top tip: don’t ever let your mum do the dishes. Mine insisted on doing so after we had them round for Sunday lunch.

Oh my dear God, a whole other thread! 16 years we’ve been in this house. Washing up may be done, it may be dried as well. But it will not be put away in a cupboard, as they can’t remember don’t know which cupboard they got it out from.

They do know where the cutlery drawer is, to be fair. Getting the forks in the slot with the other forks, knives in the same slot as the other knives etc, that appears to be beyond them, even with a combined total of 148 years living on this sodding planet! 👿

It’s not a wife thing – my husband does it and it drives me crazy. Can never find anything.

twistedpencil – Member
Yep, I’m down a pedal spanner that has been put away though god knows where.

You have failed part one of being a man. It should be on the tool board, in the workshop. If you don’t have either then you have failed. End of.

Oh, tidy up after yourselves you bunch of messy gits.

😉

You’ve lost the putty knife? Christ, buy another one. Unless you use it professionally, #firstworldproblems

Why would a squirrel need a putty knife?

To apply putty, presumably.

Pedal spanner normally lives in my commuter bag or the bmx kitbag took it out when changing pedals on the boys bmx, rest of tools went back in shed, pedal spanner spent 30minutes too long on the kitchen worktop. I’ve been through all the potential logical places, cutlery draws, in with the bbq equipment etc, I suspect it’ll turn up in the towels at some point where she put a set of house keys that meant I ended up changing the locks on the house…

Yep I do need a tool board. Hopefully a shed build thread will crop up this year

top tip: don’t ever let your mum do the dishes. Mine insisted on doing so after we had them round for Sunday lunch.

God yes – it does my head in. And although they have had a dishwasher for years, when they help clear up at ours they load ours up like it is a skip.

both putty knife and pedal spanner live in the shed.
they are where i last put them in the shed
no unaccompanied access to the shed, anyone, ever.

the house on the other hand, if its not still where i left it i will need to guess/ask

I’ve been helping out a lot at my Mum’s house recently – she had a couple of fairly major back operations so has been largely incapable of lifting, carrying, cleaning and so on.

So I’ve been tidying up which leads to me asking “where does …. go?” and I invariably get the staggeringly unhelpful answer of “oh, leave it there for now” or “oh, just put it up there for the moment“

NO! Either I put it away properly in the place it’s supposed to go or I leave it altogether, I’m not moving it twice! Maybe she gets it from her father; his idea of tidying was moving piles of crap randomly around the place.

Yeah tidying = stashing it in any available space out of sight which is then instantly forgotten.

cutlery draws

Argh!

My wife’s special power is the ability to know where everything we own is. It’s brilliant. Of course the reason I don’t know where everything is is that she tidies and reshuffles our worldly goods on a regular basis. Oh and I only man look rather than really look apparently.

One of our first big arguments was about tidying up

If it’s hers she can put it where she wants if it’s mine don’t fricken touch it

Seemed to clear things up anyway

One thing that my wife does that drives me utterly bonkers is that all the cutlery goes in the drawers pointing in the same direction.

Apart from the tea spoons – she’ll bung them in in whichever direction she fancies.

ARRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

My wife’s special power is the ability to know where everything we own is.

Can you ask her where the little USB dongles for my wireless keyboard and mouse are? They’re definitely not where (I think) I left them.

My wife just piles stuff that needs to go back into the garage by the back door. I move them pretty quickly, because if I don’t the cat will piss on them!!

I’m pretty sure they’re a tag team nowadays….

My wife does the same, she loses her own stuff too. “Hidey-tidying” we call it.

I use a simple rule, I put away my own untidiness things every now and again, the better half’s untidiness gets put in tidy piles for her to deal with. There’s not much worse than having something put away “tidy and safe” by someone else, far from the place you last remember using said item!

Can you ask her where the little USB dongles for my wireless keyboard and mouse are? They’re definitely not where (I think) I left them.

They were put in the fruit bowl obvs!

To be fair to the fairer sex, do you know its definitely them?

You are aware of the existence of time portals, right? Our house has got at least 10. So what happens is that say I’m working on my bike, and I briefly put a particular tool down, say a spanner, the time portal will open up, a hand will emerge from the portal, grab the spanner, then it will close, leaving me baffled and sweary about its sudden and unexpected disappearance.

That portal will then remain closed for an average of a week, when it will open up again, the hand will once again pop out and the spanner will be placed back down in the exact spot from where it was taken, a week earlier

There are at least 4 in the kitchen, and a particularly active one next to my desk

Anything my wife doesn’t want to deal with / doesn’t understand its purpose / finds vaguely unappealing or aesthetically incongruous gets dumped onto my desk. I generally ignore the accumulating stuff until I can no longer see my computer, whereby the whole lot gets chucked.

Rare moment of humility from my Dad on this subject. Parents split up after my brother and I left home.

A few years later he said:

“I always had tools and pens go missing, and I always blamed you two. Turns out they go missing at exactly the same rate when it’s only me in the house!”

@binners – kind of the same with wife allocated tasks.

“When a man says he’s going to do something he’s going to do it. There’s no need to be reminded every six months or so.”

Thank god for this thread, I thought it was just my wife.

She attacks the house like some nutter in a pickle because the Vicar is coming for tea or something, “oh you’re so messy” and 15 mins later the house looks in order – unless you open a cupboard or something and the world falls out of it and pours all over the floor.

We moved in about 6 weeks ago, during that day I happened upon the doorbell, it’s one of those wireless ones. I’ll leave that on the kitchen top as it doesn’t seem to work, I thought “probably batteries”. But it was “tidied” into oblivion and ever since it seems that every caller feels the need to knock on the door like the Police “Sorry, I don’t think your bell works” “No, it’s tidy” which when you’re Welsh could mean a few things.

“Hidey-tidying” we call it.

Our phrase is “somewhere safe.”

“Have you seen the $thing?” – “Yeah, I put it somewhere safe.” – “oh gods, that’s the last we’ll ever see of that, then.”

I am so glad its not just my wife either.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said “please leave that, I need to sort it out for work” Only to find its moved somewhere completely different later on just cause it looked untidy sitting there.

And then she goes off on one when I start ransacking the house looking for it again.

You all have spouses/partners who tidy up (even if it’s “special” tidying)?

Presumably this means you don’t regularly have the conversation that starts “Have you seen my car keys/phone/purse/car…?” Yes, that’s right, she once called me at work (200 miles away) to ask me if I knew where she’d left her car….

When I was a child I would often hear the terse tones of my father “Who’s moved my stuff?” quickly followed by “Put it away where it came from”.

I thought he was a difficult sod (he is), but as I get older I crave order and tidiness more and more. It’s partly driven by regular work travel and the need to travel light and pack quickly, but it’s also driven by time: I just don’t want to spend it searching out things.

Unfortunately a few years ago we introduced another female into the house (our daughter) and she seems to have inherited the genetic disposition to untidiness….

You’ll find me in the garage. Tidying up.

I’m glad it’s not just my husband who can’t find things which are blatantly right in front of his eyes and/or exactly where he left them….. Think yourselves lucky us wives have built in superpowers to find “very important stuff” that their husbands have “put somewhere safe”….. 😆

I am entirely capable of tidying up after myself in such a way that I cannot find whatever it was again. I require some fairly rithless systems for keeping things in their proper place…

🙂