Part of the reason I loathe doing housework and avoid it for far too long is because I was the one who did most of it growing up. Every day I had a chores list with stuff like dishes, dusting, vacuuming.

I...think I'm Plei and Cass. Why aren't I prettier?

Loving soggy Deena. Loving posting Deena, when you can.

I'm a big proponent of the little bits of cleaning wherever you are. I always use the dishcloth, the high chair, and the wall illustration. If I have the dishcloth in my hand, wiping down the table after lunch, and I rinse it out and wipe down the high chair (take off the tray and get the underside, because you do not want to put your hand on dried unidentified yetz later on), and the seat, back, and footrest. Then by damn, wash down the wall behind the highchair with the cloth you have in your hand. Because if you wait for an occasion to get the sponge, the bucket, the special-wall-cleaning-formula cleaner, the right temperature water, etc., etc., frelling etc., you know darn well it's never going to get done.

It may not be perfect, but it's better than not done at all.

I did dishes every day, and a lot of dusting and vacuuming, plus those years I was trying to keep everything together. I don't know why I loathe vacuuming and cleaning the kitchen counter as much as I do.

decluttering

This is our big challenge. Because a lot of the clutter is Not Mine, and so I can't just attack it and throw it out or even create an organizational system for it. But that means getting Tim to sit down and help, and he's willing, but just getting him to figure out where to put the stuff that gets decluttered...well, *that* alone takes more than the 15 allotted decluttering minutes. So...it's disheartening. But we'll get there. It's really nice to wake up to a clean kitchen sink, and see a clean(ish) bathroom whenever I go in there, and come home to a made bed. Hopefully that will motivate me to do more. And it *is* surprising how little time it really takes to do some of that stuff. It's a comparatively large ROI in terms of time expended vs. satisfaction.

And I'm not ruling Tim out on the decluttering, because the man got rid of the damn drill press. If that isn't decluttering at its finest, I don't know what is.

(Also, I really don't care about getting dressed to shoes and will happily wear pjs all day until I have to go outside. That doesn't impede my ability to clean/work/do stuff. But, again, I find it easy to roll my eyes at the FlyLady stuff I don't need and move on to the stuff that helps me.)

I am in love with the fact that there's a resource out there that has the whole how to keep a house thing all figured out for me, because I would never, ever, ever, never, ever, never take the time to figure it out, make a chart or whatever myself, and I have very little learned or instinctual behavior about it (I know how to clean individual things, but the whole house at equilibrium, not so much).

So, since I don't care about it except that I hate living in squalor, I'm psyched someone else who figured it out is sharing it for free and that a bunch of you have used it, modified it, and had success.

And I totally will start one day. I mean, I signed up, but I haven't started yet. But I will.

But, again, I find it easy to roll my eyes at the FlyLady stuff I don't need and move on to the stuff that helps me.

And I know I can totally do this, so I'm good.

I mean, my mom taught me *how* to clean stuff, but not *when* to. So nothing ever triggers me to say, hey, I should clean that.

Same here.

Doing floors on a schedule is helpful, because I never, ever think about the floors. I do hate vacuuming just from wrestling the loud, clunky, noisy beast, cutting and pulling the hair off the beater bar every frelling time, swabbing out the insides after emptying the collecting cup, washing and drying the cup and replacing it. I mean, most of the time I don't mind cleaning. What gets to me is having to clean the implements and tools you use to clean. Insult to injury, sort of.

Anyway, I never think to sweep or mop. I guess I just never look down. So having the task on a schedule at least makes sure it gets tended to.

Yeah, I don't see floors much either. My quirk (one of) is that I don't mind loading the dishwasher, but I hate putting dishes away. I should get over that. Maybe seeing how little time it takes will help with that.

Like, if the dishwasher is clean, I'll spend the next day and a half washing individual meal dishes instead of emptying the dishwasher so I could just put those in the dishwasher! Silly.

Floors are the bane of my existence. Whenever I am not cleaning the floors or just finished cleaning the floors (which is surprisingly not too often, considering how I obsess about them) I am thinking, man, look at those tufts of cat hair drifting and that random spot of- what is that? - on the tile floor and, damn, I really need to clean the floors.

But my couch holds me and tells me to forget about those damn floors. My couch will love me forever! Screw you, floors!

See also: the bathrooms.

My quirk (one of) is that I don't mind loading the dishwasher, but I hate putting dishes away.

Me, too. My main solution has been to put dishes away whenever I'm microwaving something. Of course, that's during the brief periods when the dishwasher is working.

Oh, good tip. And that will keep me from stopping the coffee re-heating process with three seconds left because I'm tired of waiting.