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.

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.