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[quote=Anonymous]I feel for you OP.  I’m also a child of a low level hoarder.  My kids have never spent the night at grandmas house because it’s not in any condition for them to stay there - and my oldest is in highschool.  We also had lots of renovations the first few years in our house though not as dire as holes in the subfloor. I am fortunate that my DH does laundry and cook.  Are you able to get your DH to take on some daily chores?  I would phrase it as either or, like would he like laundry or cooking?  Doing dishes or general cleanup of the kitchen(wipe down counters clean floor etc)?

When my kids were about 3 or so, I had a professional organizer help me clear clutter.  I was overwhelmed and needed someone to help me get started.  I also wanted to think of systems that could help me keep on top of things.  I won’t claim victory because it’s like kicking a bad habit. Sometimes it doesn’t happen on the first try, it’s hard to change and easy to backslide.  But what that foray taught me was to really think about your daily actions and what’s realistic.  If the first thing you do is drop the mail, and  the official place for the mail 20 feet into the house it’s never realistically going to make it there.  We got a tabletop shredder in the kitchen near where the mail is sorted - it’s wonderful and way better than waiting than stacking  it up and getting the basement shredder out. I set up action files and have a place to put the school papers like lunch forms that need action but not that minute.  Every closet has a closet organizer (that was during an earlier organizing effort). As for motivation, for me the big purges often were tied to getting a room together.  Like we were moving the kids into their own rooms and had to get the guest room cleared out. Having new furniture/paint was part of the motivation and once it was done and all that hard work, I wanted it to stay nice.  As part of keeping things clean, the only thing that works is when I have a schedule to follow.  For awhile, Friday evenings  were clean bedding and start laundry. With the kids, the don’t get to do something they want to do, like watch tv, until clothes are put away.  When they were much younger (4 or 5) we did chore pad app each night before bedtime  and they could earn points for fun things they wanted to do.  Besides wanting to not let things get so bad that it would cause contention in my marriage, I wanted to model better behavior for my kids so this wouldn’t be a burden in their relationships.

One last thing I wanted to ask, have you rented out the apartment yet that was the selling point of the house?  I’m thinking if you have extra income maybe you can use the money to hire out for some of the House projects to get them done sooner.  I remember when the kids were young when my DH would basically spend what seemed all weekend on errands for her house or lawn care.  While those needed to be done, that left keeping the kids entertained, getting them to clean up (which takes 3 times as long as doing it yourself) plus trying to do my own cleaning/clutter reduction.  What came of our conversations around that was he would take the kids out the house while I cleaned my own stuff , we would discuss getting the kids to clean and who would be in charge of it. He would sometimes take this on but also recognized it was the less pleasant of the weekend chore options. He was also more aware about coordinating errands and say ahead if he would be out of pocket doing errands in Saturday, I might use that time to get the kids out the house since I would need to be the parent in charge during that time anyway.  Then maybe he would be on deck with the kids on Sunday and I could do my errands without the kids.[/quote]

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