Nic Dempsey

I’m going to start this post by talking about my parents. I grew up, with one tidy but stressed person (hi Ma!) and one very messy person (Dad).

Dad was messy and just did not notice it, he wasn’t dirty (best ever hospital admission description of my unconscious father – “unkempt but clean”) but his clothes were left where he took them off, I never saw him make a bed or wash up, tidy was not a word or a state of being he understood. Ma is extremely tidy, everything has a place, as I kid I always knew if she was home because her handbag was left in the same spot in the kitchen.     Ma’s take on it, is that if you know where things are supposed to be and you make sure that you put them there, then life is easier.

Ma’s love of tidiness seems to go with her organised, maths brain. I don’t have that. I’m not the member of the family that knows all the train times, or is good at mental arithmetic, that’s my brother. I’m like my father, not quite as creative as he was, I can’t draw but my skills are people and their motives and I’ve struggled and still do to be a completer finisher type of person. My share of the family genetics was to be a bit ginger and a lot messy.

And so it has been.

I’m pretty good at the weekend cleaning nowadays, the Weekend Tasklist posts have been really useful in keeping me on track and the state of the flat ok, it never takes that long to make it ‘company ready’. I make my bed every day too.

Last week, I discovered Unfuck Your Habitat and although it’s primarily for people who are more in the weeds of a messy house than I am, some of the stuff applied. I’ve been upfront about my SAD and occasional mild depression and I’m aware of how the state of the flat and my mental state often go hand in hand. This is a great description of how that cycle works and worth reading.

So I keep the flat semi tidy most of the time and clean it at the weekend.

However, it’s fair to admit that during the week, keeping the house clean is hard. During the week, I have to get up in the dark and go to work and try and accomplish things there and the journey to work is exhausting and I have to make sure I’ve got lunch or it’s straight to EAT for my favourite sandwich and a packet of vegetable crisps. Which really aren’t good for my body or my wallet. So I do the bare minimum, safe in the knowledge that I’ll have the weekend to catch up and restore order. This means that the washing that I did on Sunday hangs ‘drying’ in my room for the entire week and doesn’t get ironed and I’ll do the washing up every day but I don’t put it away so that needs to be done in the morning and so on for the thousand little things that need to be done.

It also means that if I’m busy at the weekend or get derailed by a migraine (which happens monthly at the moment) then the whole strategy goes to hell in a handcart and the next week is horrible and derails all my good intentions.

So last week, I decided that I would devote some more time during the week to keeping the flat tidy and see what happened. I needed to get off my bum and just do the small things that I most often can’t be arsed to do, put away shoes, coat and scarves as soon as I got home. After dinner make sure that I’d sorted food for the next day, wash up and put away plates etc, wipe down surfaces and sweep the floor in the kitchen, make sure that I knew what I was wearing the following day, sort out my handbag so everything (bus pass!) was in it, leave the living room tidy.

Nothing on that list actually takes very long, I just needed to stop making excuses about how hard it was and just bloody do it. So I’ve been just getting it done. All of it takes about half an hour. I’m normally done by 8pm. Yes, some evenings it feels like an enormous chore but it is making a huge difference to how I feel when I get up and how my mornings work the next day.

I’m never going to love housework and my flat is never going to be perfectly tidy or organised (see the stuff on top of the fridge!) but turns out that my mother was right, an orderly mind does start with an orderly space!