3500 sq foot house, 3 adults, 2 elementary kids, one toddler. I am a clean freak and give maids come every other week now that both DH and I work from home. Just couldn’t keep up during lockdown and the baby. I don’t think I’ll go back, because even I’m between I may mop. I vacuum probably every other day/every day because of the baby, but I have a dyson animal and it’s super easy. Nanny cleans the counters, sweeps periodically. The maid change the sheets every other week. HHI is 390 recently and it’s worth it, even if we don’t put as much in the kids college fund because the feeling of a clean house is priceless.

I had health issues last year and so I’m working on clutter, so we are a medium clutter house. I put away everything in the living room every night.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The horsey casual rich people in Middleburg sound like people I’d like to know. Dog hair and gin? Yes please.

The germaphobe anal clenching strivers who bought the Restoration Hardware catalog dream? Not as much.

Living rooms might get hairy I’m sure, but horse people in general are very clean. Keeping things clean is like 75% of good horsemanship. Joe Fargis’s (living legend Olympian based in Middleburg) barn was the cleanest place I’ve ever seen. You could eat off the floor.

This! If you know, you know.

Yeah I actually think horse people let the dogs everywhere because they’re just already used to regularly cleaning everything. Like nothing is “kept clean,” but everything gets dirty and is then restored to clean. Although when I watch little kids go through mud in their paddock boots I still get stress hives.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My ILs are super wealthy with cleaning service but they are incredibly dirty, so it's never clean enough even with the service. They wait for the gardener to pick up the dog poop from the yard and they have 3 huge dogs. They wear shoes indoors, they let the dogs on the furniture etc.

Taking off shoes to come indoors is very annoying when you aren’t wearing slip ons. What about when you need to go back and forth to load things in/out of the car?

Sick white culture

What?

Wearing shoes in the house

Firstly, I’m white and I don’t wear shoes in the house nor does any other white person I know.

Secondly, white culture isn’t a thing. Black culture is because Blacks in America have a shared culture and history and lost their home culture when they were enslaved. (So they no longer have their Ghanaian or Congolese or whatever culture because they were robbed of it.) There is no monolithic white culture. I have and share an American culture. I also have my English and Irish culture. Just as Black people are not a monolith, nor are white people. Learn something today, ok?

This is really bizarre you'd post this. Black culture may not be a thing too as you have folks coming from many countries, same as whites. Not everyone is from Africa.

We don't wear shoes in the house. They stay in our kitchen.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
There is a difference between dirty and cluttered.

My family of 4 lives in a tiny home where we cannot actually put away everything that needs to be put away. It's always cluttered, despite a minimalist outlook.

We take off our shoes, clean weekly, etc, but it's still terribly, terribly cluttered. And that makes it hard to clean, which is such a pain.

Same!

Same here. Its hard not to have stuff around when you have 1000 square feet.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My ILs are super wealthy with cleaning service but they are incredibly dirty, so it's never clean enough even with the service. They wait for the gardener to pick up the dog poop from the yard and they have 3 huge dogs. They wear shoes indoors, they let the dogs on the furniture etc.

Taking off shoes to come indoors is very annoying when you aren’t wearing slip ons. What about when you need to go back and forth to load things in/out of the car?

Sick white culture

What?

Wearing shoes in the house

Firstly, I’m white and I don’t wear shoes in the house nor does any other white person I know.

Secondly, white culture isn’t a thing. Black culture is because Blacks in America have a shared culture and history and lost their home culture when they were enslaved. (So they no longer have their Ghanaian or Congolese or whatever culture because they were robbed of it.) There is no monolithic white culture. I have and share an American culture. I also have my English and Irish culture. Just as Black people are not a monolith, nor are white people. Learn something today, ok?

Anonymous wrote:This topic comes up on DCUM periodically. I think some people clean way too much.

For a while we had a weekly housekeeper and it just felt silly. Why is she mopping a floor that isn’t even that dirty? Are sheets really that bad after my 7 year old sleeps on them for 7 nights? Why?

I also have followed the Clean Mama housekeeping method on Instagram and it similarly seems like overkill. Does my clean shower really get that dirty after $ days of me showering in it? How?

Kitchen counters, kitchen floor, etc. are obvious daily tasks. We have to vacuum and dust once a week due to pets. We don’t wear our shoes in the house. I don’t think we’re filthy but I also don’t understand the paranoia around some posters’ cleaning schedules.

I mean, it's your house so you should do what you want. But:

Floors get dirty because people walk on them (yes, even without shoes) and spill food on them, and then walk on them some more. Pets make everything dirty all the time. Your floor could be mopped daily and never really be clean. Having it mopped once a week will keep it from ever getting too gross. It's really not a ridiculous level of cleanliness.

Your shower gets dirty because you are dirty when you get in it, and the dirt winds up on the shower and builds up. Also, many people have hard water that leaves residue on their shower (we do, for instance) and each shower contributes to build up. And with hard water build up, the shower will get even dirtier because then the dirt from your body adheres to the hard water build up, and so on. Cleaning it once a week keeps it from getting really gross.

Your kid sweats and farts in his sleep. Each night. After a week of doing this, the sheets will smell a bit, have bacteria and microbes in them. You wash them to make them smell nice again, to get rid of that.

Washing the floors, the shower, and your sheets once a week isn't overkill, nor is it obsessive cleaning. I'm not saying I always do these things and never skip a week, but my house is cleaner and more pleasant when I do.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My ILs are super wealthy with cleaning service but they are incredibly dirty, so it's never clean enough even with the service. They wait for the gardener to pick up the dog poop from the yard and they have 3 huge dogs. They wear shoes indoors, they let the dogs on the furniture etc.

Taking off shoes to come indoors is very annoying when you aren’t wearing slip ons. What about when you need to go back and forth to load things in/out of the car?

Sick white culture

What?

Wearing shoes in the house

This topic comes up on DCUM periodically. I think some people clean way too much.

For a while we had a weekly housekeeper and it just felt silly. Why is she mopping a floor that isn’t even that dirty? Are sheets really that bad after my 7 year old sleeps on them for 7 nights? Why?

I also have followed the Clean Mama housekeeping method on Instagram and it similarly seems like overkill. Does my clean shower really get that dirty after $ days of me showering in it? How?

Kitchen counters, kitchen floor, etc. are obvious daily tasks. We have to vacuum and dust once a week due to pets. We don’t wear our shoes in the house. I don’t think we’re filthy but I also don’t understand the paranoia around some posters’ cleaning schedules.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My ILs are super wealthy with cleaning service but they are incredibly dirty, so it's never clean enough even with the service. They wait for the gardener to pick up the dog poop from the yard and they have 3 huge dogs. They wear shoes indoors, they let the dogs on the furniture etc.

Taking off shoes to come indoors is very annoying when you aren’t wearing slip ons. What about when you need to go back and forth to load things in/out of the car?

Sick white culture

What?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
There is a difference between dirty and cluttered.

My family of 4 lives in a tiny home where we cannot actually put away everything that needs to be put away. It's always cluttered, despite a minimalist outlook.

We take off our shoes, clean weekly, etc, but it's still terribly, terribly cluttered. And that makes it hard to clean, which is such a pain.

Same!

You have too much stuff. Unless your family has hobbies like playing large instruments or they all have hockey gear and woodworking hobbies, there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to fit into a 500ft2 place if you want to. Ask me how I know.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My ILs are super wealthy with cleaning service but they are incredibly dirty, so it's never clean enough even with the service. They wait for the gardener to pick up the dog poop from the yard and they have 3 huge dogs. They wear shoes indoors, they let the dogs on the furniture etc.

Taking off shoes to come indoors is very annoying when you aren’t wearing slip ons. What about when you need to go back and forth to load things in/out of the car?

Sick white culture

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The horsey casual rich people in Middleburg sound like people I’d like to know. Dog hair and gin? Yes please.

The germaphobe anal clenching strivers who bought the Restoration Hardware catalog dream? Not as much.

Living rooms might get hairy I’m sure, but horse people in general are very clean. Keeping things clean is like 75% of good horsemanship. Joe Fargis’s (living legend Olympian based in Middleburg) barn was the cleanest place I’ve ever seen. You could eat off the floor.

This! If you know, you know.

Anonymous wrote:The horsey casual rich people in Middleburg sound like people I’d like to know. Dog hair and gin? Yes please.

The germaphobe anal clenching strivers who bought the Restoration Hardware catalog dream? Not as much.

Living rooms might get hairy I’m sure, but horse people in general are very clean. Keeping things clean is like 75% of good horsemanship. Joe Fargis’s (living legend Olympian based in Middleburg) barn was the cleanest place I’ve ever seen. You could eat off the floor.

My sister is like this. She is bipolar. Her husband has severe autism.

Anonymous wrote:
There is a difference between dirty and cluttered.

My family of 4 lives in a tiny home where we cannot actually put away everything that needs to be put away. It's always cluttered, despite a minimalist outlook.

We take off our shoes, clean weekly, etc, but it's still terribly, terribly cluttered. And that makes it hard to clean, which is such a pain.

Same!