Welcome to My Messy House

Hello! I’m so glad you’re still reading. I have to admit I had gotten into a bit of a messie rut in the past year. I haven’t had time to maintain this site (it seems like every time I log on, I have to update something!)

About a month ago, I started working on clearing certain spaces in my house. I’m usually pretty good at keeping a neat desk at work, so I decided to transfer that to my home. I started with the bathroom counter. I’ve been able to successfully keep it mostly clear for a few weeks now (except when I’m drying my hand-washed hand-knitted socks.) Now, I’m going to work on my area of the living room, which often becomes a mountain of books I’m reading for school. I’m going to completely clear it over the next week and work on keeping it completely clear whenever I am not actually working.

I’m also working on getting stuff out of my house. I have a lot of things to take to Goodwill and the library sale. I should document them in pictures while I am getting them out of the house.

If you have tried to post a comment here and have gotten an error, don’t worry– your comment has gone into the moderation queue. I just approved a bunch, so you should see your comment soon. I need to update the software, but I can only do so much at once. Thanks for your patience!

Have you heard of this book, “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder (How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place)”? It sounds wonderful. Apparently, the authors’ premise is that a little bit of messiness makes the world a better place. Slightly messy people are apparently more flexible and have more time (because they’re not spending every minute putting things away.) I think they have a point. I have a wonderful Cleanie friend I’ve mentioned before here. She often told me that she was envious of the cool things I did, like taking college classes, writing stories, crocheting… things like that. I think she felt trapped by her high expectations of cleanliness. Her house was beautiful and clean and organized, but sometimes, I think she felt like that was all she had.

I’m trying to be a better Messie. Now that I have created enough good, healthy cleaning habits, I’m trying to relax about the rest of the mess. I want my kids to bring their friends over without me having a heart attack. My house will never meet my imaginary standard of how a house is supposed to look, so I need to accept that sometimes, there will be mail on the table, a few dishes in the sink, some books by my chair. I think I need that book. It might help after a steady diet of Anti-Mess books.

What do you think? Is a little bit of messiness a good thing?

I was a messie kid. I remember being put in my sty… I mean room… and told not to come out until it was clean. The whole thing was too overwhelming for me! For starters, I didn’t know how to declutter, and to make things worse, I didn’t know how to maintain. Even when my stepmom threw away three bags of my stuff against my will, I still couldn’t get it together. I didn’t do this to be spiteful… I was just clueless.
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It’s never too early to think about holiday preparations. Now is the time to start getting ready. I’ll be starting in September with the plan on Organized Christmas. Whatever I do has to be easy and painless, since I won’t have a lot of time.

My holiday breaks up into several categories:

Food
Presents
Cleaning
Visiting
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I’m nearing the end of the semester, so I’m looking forward to having three weeks to work on my house and this site! One of the changes I hope to make is to add the ability to have other authors. It might be a long time before I have the time to write the many articles I would like to write for the site, but I can’t explain why I won’t have time just yet. I would love it if some of our regular messies could contribute articles. Some day, I might even be able to pay!