Homework Meme 29-31

Homework: A Household Meme questions from last three weeks...

HomeWork: Week 31
What about outdoor work: how much time do you devote to it? Is your yard well-manicured, or does it tend to look like a prairie? Do you sweep your porch regularly, or only when leave and dust begin to create visible hills? If you have an apartment with little or no outside maintenance required, did this play a part in your decision to live there?

Acck, neither my husband or I do yardwork. We have people come in every two weeks and mow the yard and blow the pine needles off the roof. I'd really like to have a nicer looking yard, but I can't tolerate the heat or pollen from working outside. Amazingly, though, our yard is pretty healthy.

HomeWork: Week 30
Do you have a "junk closet"? "Junk drawer"? A junk room? Where do you stick stuff that has no other designated home? Does it bother you, or is it a case of "out of sight, out of mind"? Snap a picture of your catch-all space, if you're brave.

I try really, really hard NOT to have junk repositories around the house. I'll actually file stuff in lieu of leaving it sitting around whenever possible. I have a little rolling milk crate thingy under my desk that I dump random magazines in, and a big magazine sized envelope in the crate that I try and put loose receipts in as soon as I've recorded them in my checkbook, etc. Then I'll go through and file or trash them maybe two or three times a year. I have folders in my filing cabinets for things like medical and pharmacy receipts, post office receipts, and the masses of weekly eBay paperwork I accumulate. I have a shelf devoted to just magazines and catalogues and I try and weed it out every so often... Piles of paper follow me around and breed like rabbits so I have to make a huge effort to fight them off.

Actually the ickiest room in our house is probably the garage because I have a lot of random packing materials for eBay out there. I actually have some of it organized, but all of the boxes waiting to be reused tend to be a leaning tower of terror sometimes.

HomeWork: Week 29
How do you cope with living with other people whose ideas of "clean enough" differ drastically from yours? Are your housemates comfortable with much more clutter than you are, or perhaps much less? What compromises have you found? (Or do you compromise, in the case of family or children?)

My husband is a neat freak in ways I'm not and vice-versa. He likes to vacuum constantly and neither of us like to leave dirty dishes lying around. But instead of putting them in the dishwasher he'll balance them all on a towel on the counter to dry which drives me nuts.

I don't care if the bed doesn't get made daily, but it drives him nuts. Our compromise there is if I make it I'll throw the comforter over the pillows instead of laying all of them on top of it so it's easier to unmake. (We have tempurpedic pillows, they weight a ton).

He also has even more stuff than I do, but we sort of divided the house up - I get my office/living room, most of the kitchen, the hall bath and the master bedroom. He can put his stuff in the rest of the house (his room is a claustrophobic's nightmare). He's trying to work his way into the master bedroom, he thinks I haven't noticed, but I'm keeping an eye on it ;-) It's the only room in the house which is sort of unfinished and he's been told he's not allowed to clutter it up.

We each dust our own respective rooms (usually before company comes over), and clean our own bathrooms, etc.

Posted by Morticia at September 10, 2004 04:02 AM | TrackBack