My house is a mess!

Yeah, screw that heat. making me so messy.

Our big problem is animal-hair tumbleweeds and no ventailiation in the bathrooms which make them always too swampy. i just take a shop-vac to the tumbleweeds every few days.

oh Archel! That will not do. you should get a better one before the baby comes.

We were trying to be so energy efficient and all, but now I'm like: bring on the power guzzling turbo maxi-load washer-dryer pls.

It's in its kiss.

My boyfriend doesn't need to know there are people like you out there hand-cranking your laundry. at the slighest mention of someone having it worse, I'm jumped all over b/c I complain too much. (e.g. about having to carry laundry from washer in kitchen to dryer in garage when it's 100+F outside. I'll stop with that one.)

Our whole house has slate floors! So cool and dry. and hard. Seriously, I'm now appreciative of all the back-breaking labor we put forth in feb/april on those floors.

hot tramp, i love you so!

xpost

I feel like the basement is my subconscious mind, and now that it's a lot cleaner I feel like I Won The World.

am still calculating how much better life will be if i organized piles of papers/books vs energy expenditure of doing so. i did change a bike tire yesterday. and sweated through shorts and shirt.

would like to wear a particular skirt today but it requires ironing. (and some sewing. stupid gap things and their stupid hems always coming apart. it was only $10, but...) screw you, skirt.

Now, one of my trees is dying, there is all sorts of yard waste detritus, not to mention an old rusty swingset lying on it's side on the patio. But hey, I have a privacy fence, so, whatevers!

Our cleaning lady only comes on tuesday (yes, today) and thursday this week. I won't notice the difference. ;-)

The mildew resistance only lasts for about a week. Once that smelly chemical coating washes away, all the spores who were biding their time behind the toilet tank come out and party!

Rrrob: bathtub still requires me to scrub in sections and roll up or fold the excess around the edges. Possible, but complicated. Miz Miz: Don't have a washer in house, plus the curtain is clear vinyl with silver glitter in it -- I don't think clothes washe is the answer. :/

my bldg manager just randomly gave me one of those white plastic tube things to go over my rusting shower curtain rod. it's a minor pleasure.

New problem! We have a claw-foot tub which I LOVE but either it's not properly angled or our floor isn't flat (take your pick) -- the upshot is that it doesn't slant enough to drain and the standing water that accumulates makes the tub dirty and scummy within SECONDS of cleaning. Should I get a bunch of boys over and try to shim the back end up? I don't know what else to do.

Quick! revive the pudding thread it's a much nicer topic!

i want my own washer. i am also getting tired of renting. i need a BASE.

laurel, throw out roommate's freakin teas and crap. put them in a garbage bag and say they are a health hazard/full of bugs. i mean, she can pick out the ones she really wants and the rest = garbageo.

One more thought on shower-curtain mold—I don't consider removing the shower curtain to scrub it in the yard or launder it as an option because I HATE unhooking it from the rings!!!! The stupid things are badly designed, all of them (and I've been through several plastic types and now have stupid metal ones with little rolling balls that FALL OFF), and by the time you get to the twelfth one your arms have HAD IT from being held aloft and straining unfamiliar muscles! And this is me talking, the donkey-work aficionado. I don't shy from dumb physical labor.

Wiggy! Hello! I forgot about the pudding thread. The cheese thread is my new weakness.

http://www.squalorsurvivors.com/pictures/index.shtml

Also, I saw a roach last night. After our horrific battle of last summer, roaches give me The Fear and I will KILL KILL KILL. Where's that number for Orkin, anyway.

we have a smallish bathroom and had a real problem with the mildew/mold on our old shower curtain. id clean it off and it would be back in a week. then i bought a 'hotel grade' backing shower curtain from target. i guess they use these things as backing for fabric shower curtains. its nice and thick and white. anyway, we've had it up for about three months now and not a sign of mold. best $10 Ive spent in the bathroom, for sure.

xpost

But the Dirt Queen was one of the least depressed, most happy-go-lucky persons I'd ever met. Generally, I've had a bit of experience with depression and can spot it. She just had hoarder OCD with nothing else attached.

Yeah that's the cure for depression Laurel! ;)

Some are worse than others Sunny. "Kimmy's" seem the worse. And while yeah, I took comfort that the 'after' photos' are still worse than our unpacked/slightly cluttered house, I can see it was a big change for those people.

I've definitely come close to that depression-squalor. when I was teaching in dallas I lived in a horrid little apartment where the back door was literally rotting off the hinges. There was a hole in the ceiling and the bathtub was so old and gross there's no way you'd sit in it. Coming home to a place like that after a crushingly stressful workday didn't inspire me to be suzy homemaker.

xx-post

Kimmie's "after" pictures still look like the home of a depressed person. Bleak and yucky.

But in New York City, and along much of the East Coast, a dwelling jammed rafter-high with junk is referred to by rescue personnel, with dismay and no small degree of respect, as a "Collyers' Mansion." As in, primary searches delayed because of Collyers' Mansion conditions.

The phrase, as many New York history buffs know, refers to the legendary booby-trapped brownstone in Harlem in which the brothers Homer and Langley Collyer were found dead in 1947 amid more than 100 tons of stockpiled possessions, including stacks of phone books, newspapers, tin cans, clocks and a fake two-headed baby in formaldehyde.

The Collyer Mansion is not just a slice of urban lore and a monument to what psychologists now recognize as obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is, in New York, an official term of art, taught in the Fire Academy to cadets learning the potential dangers that can await in burning buildings.

So, on Monday, after 14 firefighters were injured putting out a three-alarm apartment fire in Sunnyside, Queens, Deputy Chief John Acerno described the scene this way: "They tried to open the door, and they couldn't get it open because of all the debris that was behind the door. In Fire Department jargon, we call that a Collyers' Mansion. There was debris from the floor to the ceiling throughout the entire apartment."

The apartment's tenant, Vycheslav Nekrasov, was in critical condition last night at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell hospital.

The Breaking News Network, a service run by scanner hounds that some news outlets subscribe to, has sent out reports of "Collyers' Mansion conditions" at least 10 times in the past three months.

Once upon a time, the Collyers were routinely invoked by frustrated parents. "Every time my room was a mess when I was a kid, my mom would say, 'My God, this looks like the Collyer brothers' house," said John Miller, the head spokesman for the F.B.I., who said he heard the phrase sometimes when he worked for the New York Police Department as a deputy commissioner.

But as 1947 recedes ever further into the past, the facts behind the lingo are fading. A spokesman for the Fire Department, Allan Shaw, who has been a firefighter for eight years, recalled learning about Collyer conditions at the academy, but punted when quizzed on just what the Collyers' Mansion was. "Collyer, I believe, was one of those people who, I guess, at some point, had a house like that," he offered.

However widespread knowledge of its origins may be, the term itself continues to spread. An Internet search turned up references to Collyers' Mansions in news and fire department sites in Manassas, Va.; Clinton, Md.; and Cochranton, Pa. The Fire Department Web site in Clearwater, Fla., nearly 1,200 miles from Harlem, noted that at a trailer and house fire this past April, "Companies inside were experiencing Collyers' Mansion conditions as the fire intensified."

Thomas Von Essen, a former New York City fire commissioner, said that the term communicated crucial information to new firefighters. "What's dangerous is that all this stuff could fall down," he said. "Or it could weaken the floors, and when you put water on it you could have a collapse. You could fall into it and then you have a hard time getting out. You could get caught behind it; your mask could get tangled. I could guarantee you that people have gotten hurt in those kinds of situations."

Calls to about a dozen fire departments across the country yesterday yielded a few regional variants on the Collyers' Mansion, though most department officials said they knew of no special phrases.

Carl Kietzke of Seattle, the president of the International Fire Buffs Associates, said that up and down the West Coast he had heard the phrase "Habitrail house," referring to buildings there that firefighters have likened to rambling, unkempt rodent cages.

Firefighter Scott Salman, a spokesman for the Boston Fire Department, said that while the official term for excessive clutter was "heavy debris," firefighters privately refer to "pack rat" conditions.

By whatever name, said Jeff Crianza, an emergency medical technician in Queens who moonlights at the Breaking News Network, Collyers' Mansions lurk behind many more doors than the average civilian would suspect.

"I see it every day in E.M.S.," Mr. Crianza said. "It's a wonder more people aren't injured in those places."

Correction: July 7, 2006

An article on Wednesday about the phrase "Collyers' Mansion," used to refer to a dangerously cluttered dwelling, misstated the authenticity of an artifact found in the Collyer brothers' Harlem brownstone, the jam-packed building that spawned the term now often used by firefighters. Although some of the artifacts recovered, like musical instruments, were determined to be fakes, a two-headed baby in a jar of formaldehyde found in the house was actually real.

and you might get a two-headed baby along the way!

Laurel, I understand what you're saying and hospitals can be good for this for those in a severely depressed state.

i understand what you mean too, Laureland - a monk-like dwelling could be a could brain vacation for many people, myself included. i mean, in a way, hotel rooms, nice ones, are kind of monk-like in their sparseness (no niknaks, stored items, etc.), plus you're not responsible for cleaning them.

Also the floors are in a permanent hairy state, because of Cody's furriness. Hairy dogs are lovely for petting, but a pain to clean up after.

I'm slowly getting to grips with a regular cleaning routine after a year suffering with a bad back (you know the kind: you're not sick enough to stay at home from work, but it hurts when you sneeze) that prohibited any kind of bathroom cleaning or hoovering.

But god, this heat. And you have to cut the stupid grass in the summer too! Stupid summer.

-did the dishes
-got the trash bag ready to go downstairs
-folded the clean laundry i dumped onto the floor in haste earlier

i'm a little anal about keeping a clean apartment in weather like this. i don't want to attract bugs or varmints.

this made me remember of a news story I heard/or read a little while back. Some county was housing the more "mildly" depressed patients they had no hospital beds for in hotel rooms. Of course taxpayers were appalled, etc. etc. I believe the county said the option was therapeutic and cheaper than nothing in the long run. Maybe someone should start a private hotel/retreat that's just for the depressed/"exhausted". Not quite a hospital but better than home.

I actually tidied up a bit after viewing Kimmie's place.

wet towels + humidity ---> mildew!

I remember reading a story that travelling gentlemen would always take a pig with them to hotels, the reason being that they would put the pig in the bed while they were dining so that the bedbugs in their room would have fed themselves for the evening, meaning the gentlemen wouldn't get bites. It also had the pleasant side effect of warming the bed for them.

My brother used to never wash towels either, because he claimed you didn't need to, because you were clean when you used them.

haha, classic reasoning! Apparently the optimum time to wash your towels is after 7 uses. Any less than this and you are wasting resources by needlessly washing, and by this point enough of your skin has caused the towel to loose a lot of its absorbancy..

It doesn't mean that my sister won't decide she needs THREE towels for some ungodly reason and raid your closet for a blue one instead of her pink, but at least you know which one is yours when you find it under her bed a month later.

omg! I thought this was just me! Drawers almost closed - 1/2" from actually being shut - why does this make me so ... so ... aaarrgghh!

bottlecaps on the floor/in the couch/on tables/in the cat bowls
newspapers on the floor
wet kitchen sink
cats trying to dig to china in the kitty litter so it ends up sprayed all over the floor
towels not matching

domestic things i hate hate hate doing even though theyre pretty easy:

emptying the diswasher
touching napkins and paper towels
hanging up clothes
changing the quilt cover

domestic things I do that , no doubt, piss off others:

never empty the dishwasher - i take out one plate/utensil at a time and close it back up.
leave clothes in the drier for days
leave half full glasses and soda cans all over the place
get out of the shower dripping wet

You, YOU'RE the one SOAKING my bathroom floor!! Yes, yes, I'm of the dry-off-in-the-tub tribe and our totem object is the gorgeously unmildewed bath mat.

Did I learn my lesson? Yeah but the drawers are still 1/2way open.

haha. i try to stand there and drip dry too. SORRY!

Oh god no - imagine all the THINKING you'd be able to do. I'd have a breakdown I expect :(

Apparently the optimum time to wash your towels is after 7 uses. Any less than this and you are wasting resources by needlessly washing, and by this point enough of your skin has caused the towel to loose a lot of its absorbancy.

This is sort of true - but it's actually the bacteria that feast upon the sloughed skin that reduce the towel's absorbancy. Mmmm.

ha! ditto.

i have clothes-hanging-up issues. which are maybe related to being too visual? - as in, if i can't see it, it blips out of existence for a while. so clothes tend to be folded ("folded") and laid on chairs, tops of drawers, shelves, y'know. at least they stay in my bedroom. i need one of those gigantor brightly lit closets full of accessible curtain rods and shelves with drawers for underwear and socks only. oh, and lots of shoe space.

or i need fewer clothes. ahahahahaha.

i'm an admitted slob but my ex was/is slovenly to a heroic degree. i used to think it was because she knew i'd eventually get around to cleaning our apartment when things got beyond my breaking point (which was usually when I could no longer see the floor in anyroom in the place) but when I visited her last year her new place looked the same as when we were shacking up so i think it's just her nature.

yes, count your blessings.

Does the drawer/cupboard closing thing divide on gender lines? Does what to me looks like the scene of a recent burglary look to the average male like an ordinary tidy room?

Not at all. Mister Monkey is a Closer. Doors, windows, presses, wardrobes, closed, closed CLOSED! Even if I just only left the room for a minute and was coming RIGHT BACK, he will close the door behind me.
Domestic things I hate doing:
vacuuming, because I have to do it with the bristly head in order to get all the dog hairs out of the carpet downstairs, and cat hairs upstairs. It ends up being quite the workout, and the head falls off the Dyson every ten seconds and I shout at it. Oh, I hate the stupid Dyson. It plods around after you like a simple relative in a John Steinbeck book.
Cutting the grass. I would slab over the whole back garden if I was let.
Ironing, so I just don't bother my arse.

Things I don't mind:
Cleaning the kitchen or bathroom.

Things I secretly enjoy:
Plunging the sink/bath/shower. Man, I love it when you get a big horrible plug of glop out of there and everything runs smoothly and sweetly afterwards.

Oh! I know! Great wads of hair coated with gray slime! And it's all my fault because I'm the one with long hair. If I create nothing else in this life...

RELATED PEEVE: The way black vacuum-cleaner fittings leave black marks on your white walls if you vacuum the spiderwebs along the ceiling enough times. Fuck! Why don't they make the crack-and crevice accessory out of WHITE PLASTIC!!! DUH!!!!!

My Mighty-Mite just died. I came home to find the husband vacuuming, listening to loud music, oblivious to the machine's horrible death-rattle and the smell of burning wiring. At 100 bucks, I'm sure it's cheaper to buy a new one than get some half-assed repair. Maybe now I can get a WHITE-accessoried Mighty-Mite. A Whitey-Mite!

what if your ceiling were black?

I got a chuckle out of the Whitey-Mite, though.

There didn't seem to be any more there this morning. Phew.

OH FOR A HOUSE I COULD BEAR TO CLEAN.

http://www.eurocosm.com/Application/images/Electroswat/electroswot.jpg

Electrified bug zappers seem a bit nasty, somehow. Like those ones in butchers' shops (or bakeries, or maybe both) which I remember from my childhood, when you'd be standing there while your Mum ordered some chops (or buns, or whatever) and the zapper on the wall would suddenly start buzzing as it fried a fly - all bright blue light and the smell of singed insect wings.

Flying ants don't really fly, anyway - they crawl, mostly. And reproduce with alarming speed. Thankfully mine all seem to have gorn now.

i had never seen anything like it, 30 flies on the kitchen floor dancing and then dying. it was half amusing and half sad (it would be more sad if they weren't hovering around making fly babies everywhere and putting poo on our food.)

http://www.hi-upload.com/upload/uploaded10/APT%20133%20002.jpg

I know I'm bad with all the Boing Boing links but http://www.houston-imports.com/dirty/dirty.html

I miss Beth.

xpost, dear f-in god. I really feel sorry for the cat who had to live there.

I don't know - might be kind of fun, like a giant obstacle course.

Missing Beth as well..

(xpost) be honest, this is you place, right?

more like
http://photos-f.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-snc1/v274/224/57/516053577/n516053577_632237_2148.jpg

I do like the ironing board demonstrating that this crazy person did care about outer appearances, apparently. The women's shoes/swatches of clothes I see make me wonder: woman or transvestite? I need follow up on this story.

FWIW I have seen houses that are much, much, much, much worse.

Well, these people didn't smoke, but worse otherwise. (There is really not much more depressinger than butts & ash coating everything.)

Wow Abbott - do you work in some sort of field that would introduce you to places like this, or just have messy friends?

Oh my gosh...well...

No, I don't work in such a field, thank goodness.

I had a friend in junior high who went to church with me and lived down the street. (We both lived way out in the country, and there were like 7 houses on the road...hers was a mile away.) Her parents were really bonkers. The bonkersness would have seemed far more subtle were it not for their home environment.

They had built their own home, but they'd never entirely finished it. It was a two-story house with no front or back door – the only entrance was through the garage. Half the walls were just the wooden frame/electrical outlets/wires, etc., with no drywall. (The hilarious thing here is her dad was a house inspector.) The stairs were unfinished...no rails, no carpet, etc. Weirdest of all, the second floor was basically her parents' bedroom. They hadn't even put up the framing for half the walls, though. It was just a balcony that jutted over the living room – ro rails or anything. I never went up there but you could see a bunch of shit piled up on the balcony/ledge and presumably their bed was up there, too.

I don't know if they had carpet or not because the floor was barely visible at all. All the rooms, even the kitchen, were just waist-high piles of densely piled rubbish with some trails in them to walk through. Newspapers, magazines, books, old toys, machine parts, hardware, broken goods of all sorts, glommed into levels of even density. Lord knows what all was in there, or how the hell that happened.

Everything on the walls that had drywall (a few of them were painted) – some old cross-stitches & framed photos – was completely covered in thick, brown dust & grime.

Her parents' cars were like this, too – her mom owned a Suburban SUV-type car and ALL of it except the drivers & passengers seat was full of trash. Full. Stacked to the top of the back of the driver's seat. Those things have back seats, but you couldn't see the top of the backseats because garbage had been piled onto them.

My friend complained, validly, that she could hear every single thing her parents did in their bedroom. Man, it was a really depressing house.

I need follow up on this story.

Read the comments - it's a woman.

my house is a disaster. this morning, as i was hitting snooze, i glimpsed and my room and became really alarmed.

When I moved out of my last flat it was pretty embarrasing how bad it had gotten. One spare room was basically just random piles of things, and the wardrobes were CRAMMED with useless shit.

I had to get a lot of friends to help, and it took weeks to sort, chuck, pack and move things.

Never again.

AGAIN.

Not that it's been any great shakes in the interim.

I can only do a micro-unit of work before I become overwhelmed and have to seek solace of food and/or internet.

At the request of Mr. BP: coffee table is now rid of coffee table books. No need for huge dangerous teetering piles of art and garden books that NOBODY LOOKS AT. Bought space for them on the shelves by purging my huge collection of thesauruses, rhyming dictionaries & writer's style books. Only need the Chicago Manual of Style and one dictionary, in case the internet breaks.

If you've moved the coffee table books from the coffee table, what are they classified as now? If they are still classified as coffee table books, then surely wherever they are now is now the wrong place because coffee table books by definition belong on the coffee table? (says the person who can't remember what the coffee table here even looks like because it's covered in so much stuff)

Shelved CTBs? They'll come out again, as they are actually looked at. We are, after all, us.

I've just moved house *again* since my last post, and despite 3 purges of cklothes and hard rubish in the last 12 months I still seem to have tons of junk. I like my new house though - and it's pretty small - so now I have no excuse, I have to be a hardass about tidying and not hoarding.

Every time I move it seems like I throw away half my stuff, then the next time I move (sometimes it's been as little as six months) there's just as much junk as there was before so I have to throw half of it away, etc., etc...

Yeah I swear I've thrown away a whole houseful of shit in recent years... but then again, I had 8 years of built up hoarding in a recent place. Oy, the crap. We just today left a mountain out the front for the hard rubbish collection and it was such a relief.

That creaking and rustling in the middle of he night? Not the wind. Not the house settling on its foundation.
It's all your junk having sex and making junk babies.

After my flat was broken into a couple of weeks ago a crime prevention office came round to take a look at the scene and then a few days later a friend of mine said to me on facebook "the next time you have a policeman over, make sure to tidy up first!", as the guy must have somehow known and commented to said friend about how messy my place is. Quite embarrasing.

It is a mess. I care, but I'm still not doing much about it just now.

I actually HOOVERED THE BEDROOM this past weekend. Mainly because I changed and washed the sheets after having swine flu and suddenly thought about loads and loads of little swine flu viruses leaking out all over the floor and hiding and breeding in the dust under the bed.

I might have a friend staying this weekend, so I'm going to really have to scrub the bog and stuffs. And try to contain some of the clutter in the living room. I always apologise for the mess when people come round, but what they don't know is that that mess is the result of TIDYING FOR SEVERAL HOURS before they get there. Sigh.

My parents were like that whenever people visited. Ten minutes before they'd be throwing rubbish in bin bags and hoovering like maniacs. Then when the visitor(s) arrived they'd be all "hey it's always this clean".

Also I can't hoover my bedroom at the moment because there's so much stuff in there that the big end of the hoover with the whirling brushes won't fit. And the hose can't be used because it isn't long enough and the damn thing keeps tipping over.

I just went to visit my ex who is very ill and he lives in a tiny bedsit and I swear, he is living the Bernard Black life at the moment - wet sheet on the floor and everything. It depressed the crap out of me, and I said "you can't live like this, dude!" but he got all sad and said he's been sick for weeks and everything's piled up, so I guess I couldnt have too much of a go at him. I do worry though.

I mean we had to balance an ashtray on the keys of his digital piano as there wasnt room anywhere else. That shit ain't right.

You can always pull out random drawers and use them as surfaces for junk.

My apt is a disaster. Roommate has had a guest for the last 4 days but apparently she didn't clean for the guest AT ALL. Place is filthy. Guilt her into cleaning this weekend, Y/N?

Vomit all over the mess, so she'll have to.

Actually got the downstairs quite tidy. The key is not to leave any small piles of junk staged for transport elsewhere. They only serve as seed for worse mess. It's like not taking the whole course of antibiotics. You breed supermess.

Oh god my mother is coming in 8 days.

Also we're having guests with CHILDREN tomorrow. I'm going to be cleaning all night.

The upside is that when your mother arrives you can blame the mess on those horrible children.

Nice point, but I'm not sure my mother will accept "Our friends' kids did it" when confronted with half an inch of dust on the furniture...

So I guess my apartment is not so much a mess as it is just DIRTY.

Although it is also a mess.