who here is an incurable SLOB?

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OMG. I. am. not. alone.

I have taken s**t since I was a little kid for not being neat. I tend to know where everything is, **IF** nobody messes with it. And that *is* a big if. I don't tend to have actual goo or food or dirt around, but clutter....you bet. It's been a major source of tension between my husband and me, because he's a neat freak and I really don't care, short of things that might become a culture medium for bacteria. I'd rather be learning something new about science or studying Romanian than worrying about whether or not I've left something out on the counter. What drives me nuts is that he wasn't a neat freak when I met him...he was as bad as me.

~Kate

I tend to know where everything is, **IF** nobody messes with it. And that *is* a big if. [/quote]


I hate it when that happens I always know where my stuff is unless someone moves it! I remember in high school that I had my CDs in a stack and the next day they were gone! My mother put them into one of those CD holders and I was frantically going around looking for my CDs for school and my mom already went off to work and it took me 20 minutes to find the CDs for my video production class which made late for school.

there must be a happy medium somewhere between an antiseptic lab and my normal messiness. my sister seems to have it only because she lives in a house 10 times larger than my little mobile. so i guess a secret to being neat is simply having enough space to easily organize without having to do a "rubic's cube" of moving stuff about to make room for/finding other stuff.

I live in a rather large space and we have managed to completely consume it with clutter. whoopee......

I'm a complete slob with a neatnick inside me trying desperately to get out.

So I spend much of my life in complete clutter, but I can never enjoy it, I keep seeing it and thinking "you slob." Occasionally the neatnick overpowers me and tidies things up, but he has no staying power, so I soon clutter it all up again for him.

I'm a functional slob, I'll clean my room if I'm really pissed off about it and as fast as I clean it up is as fast as it gets dirty again. I'm no where near the best organizer and it shows constantly. I like to have the stuff around me because it makes me feel protected and I like being closed in. Maybe I need to get a weighted blanket for that.

I am caretaker for my mom who is an NT...she dont like mess, but do like stuff. I on the other hand can ignore mess but I dont like stuff...except art supplies...which we have boxes of them crammed in every closet in an inhumanly and probably illegally small apartment. She likes baskets, handcrafted orphans from thrift stores, and like collecting kitchen tools and knick knacks and doo dads. Anyway, I go on cleaning binges and then it gets messed up again...the stuff creeps out of its hiding places. It is like trying to push back the tide. I think I spend half my life cleaning...and for what?!? I wish I could just cart off most of the stuff and live like a tibetian monk. If the stuff is not there...then it cant mess up anything. I try to keep things clean because mom like clean...but I try to explain to her stuff+small space=mess. There is just this critical point in which the stuff overflows a space's ability to contain it. I have learned that I cannot control my messiness, but I can control how much stuff is in the house and the less stuff there is...the less material one has to make a mess with.
but mom thinks it is just a matter of putting stuff back where it goes when I get done using it, for some reason...my brain does not compute. I can do that for a few days, but once I make a big mess...I get so overwhelmed that I block it out and there it sits and collects...until she puts the hammer down. and the cycle repeats itself...for eternity.

I could challenge your crown except for the food part. I try to keep the crumbs clean because of my cats and a fear of some scary bugs that might enjoy a crumby floor. Everything that's not crumby is fair game though and I'm the same about everything else you said. In fact, I bet I'm probably worse about a few things.

My untidiness is not for a lack of trying though. Maybe once a year I get a burst of energy and overhaul my room to a beautifully spotless wonder. Next day (or even later that same day), it's like a tornado hit. I just can't keep it together and I'm not really sure why.

maybe a good idea for you to try, would be to segregate everything you own in order of use- if you use something often, keep it close to you in sight and outside of a box or closet. if you don't use something too often, why not put it in the closet or basement? it is not like it would become totally inacessible to you should you want it. periodically, you could go through the not-often used bins of stuff and see if you could ebay it or garage sale/flea market it off on somebody else and make a bit of profit to boot.
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just my 2-cents' worth, adjusted for inflation.

I could probably challenge that crown too except I am too embarrassed to say the full extent of what happened to my apartment before I got services. Except to say that on my first day of services the woman who came said she wasn't allowed to clean messes that nasty and that she would call the office and tell them to send someone authorized to clean it. It was more than clutter and garbage and mold and I'm lucky I wasn't evicted except I hid from my landlord.

I've tried to do that a few times, but it seems executive disfunction prevents me. I try to make it all too perfect, and I have a huge number of items, so it gets very time consuming. And all my storage space is crammed full of stuff already, so I really need to begin with a throw-out session just to clear enough space to work in. There are other weird things that happen whenever I try to get my stuff organised that seem to defy description...I start getting very confused and I go round on circles. But thanks for trying.....it certainly makes good sense to keep only the frequently-used things close to hand.