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Originally posted by Nakedmarzi:
I even found that diamond necklace I lost in 1999

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I love the Easter-egg aspect to tidying blitzes. A fortnight ago I found my poesy ring (a band with something engraved on the inside, in this case LOVE AND LIVE). It dates from 1660 and it would have been cosmically embarrassing to be the person who finally lost it in its 345th year of existence. The stupid cleaner had dropped it into a tea-light holder. At least she didn't nick it. I hope my next finds are the watermelon tourmaline earring that skittered into a parallel universe when I dropped it one day, as it's certainly not on my bedroom floor, and (hangs head with utter shame) my great-grandmother's wedding ring. No wonder my mum won't give me my grandmother's diamond ring. I'm far too messy and careless to be trusted with it.

I blitzed the sitting room yesterday. Does anyone else ever get the sneaky feeling that a tidy room is kind of bland? My sitting room looks like an "Minimalist Oriental Antiques" spread in a magazine, but it's really quite dull.

Edited to add: for f*ck's sake, this is the third consecutive page on which I am the top post. You've had your joke now, Yee-fan, please stop.

Well, yesterday we spent about 5 hours just plowing through it all. It is beautiful and clean now. Last night it was like sleeping in a nice hotel room. We made a pact to keep it this way, so I hope we can.

Now we are going through our master bedroom closet, ruthlessly making piles for Goodwill and for giving away. It feels GREAT to be decluttering and actually gaining space.

Has anyone spent hours going through this thread like I just did? You know, rather than dealing with your stuff?

Yeah, I still have a Victoria's Secret bag parked on my bed, filled with my stuff from spending the night in Philly on Friday. It sat on my floor for 3 weeks before I changed the contents up from last time and personalized it to Friday and all.

My housemate is ultra super clean. Sometimes it's annoying, but mostly, I try to be out of the house while he goes at it. The sound of the vac is too much to bear on a saturday morning. He is so clean tho, and it infiltrates. I hate being forced to do *anything*, but when he's cleaning, it's mostly that I feel like I have to suck it up and do it. He throws stuff out (which pisses me off immensely) so I know that if I don't clean up, it'll be in the trash. Bills and paperwork are a huge incentive - ya know, there's a reason they place 'work' on the end of 'paper'.

My bedroom is fairly clean nowadays. I'm surprised that my daughter cleans her room every few days! She never used to, and being the slobqueen I am, I never required her to do it - she started when her friends started coming regularly.

well, after a winter of wearing my big houseslippers-that-ate-manhattan [they're big enough to feel you can stomp cities in them], i went barefoot into my kitchen today the floor is so sticky it tried to eat my foot!

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Originally posted by quarkiegirl:
This is what we all need!

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Originally posted by TinyGirl:
Having parents over for dinner did wonders for my house.

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I made the biggest pile of dirty laundry ever; it took up the whole hallway. So far I've done about 7 loads and almost hit the halfway point.

I don't think our bedroom has been this clean since we moved in, and it's so nice to be in now. Every time we've cleaned the house, we've left our room for last since we can just shut the door and not let anybody in.

My biggest problem is that I am a pack-rat. I just can't bring myself to throw things out. I develop sentimental attachments to candy wrappers, old movie posters, ticket stubs, beer mats, magazine ads, you name it. I think what I really need to start doing is taking all the "stuff" i've accumulated over the years and doing something productive with it.

Oh, add to that my intense laziness when it comes to putting stuff away. I am the type of person who feels very at home keeping my clothes strewn about, my books, make-up, shoes, and schoolwork where ever I last used them, etc.

I want to be organized and clean, and I can do it, but I just can't KEEP it that way!

How do you "unslob" yourself? I've heard that it takes 21 days to form a new habit (like replace a bad habit with a good habit). I cannot keep the clutter away for 21 days. The closet is a mess again, we're living out of the clothes basket again, and the bathroom looks like a bomb went off. Again. As much as I LOVED it when we cleaned it and it was so pretty and nice, we still are just lazy slobs. Bleh.

It's really disheartening. I see cute little organizer things in the stores and I almost buy them, but then I think, why bring something so pretty into the mess? It won't stay nice because for some reason, I won't let it.

I try to follow that mentality—emphasis on the word try. I try to remind myself that unless I plan on living in a world of clutter my whole life, I'm eventually going to have to put stuff away. It may not be today or this weekend or next week, but eventually, I WILL have to put it away. So would I rather spend 30 seconds today putting the bills in the filing cabinet, or would I rather spend half an afternoon 3 months from now putting all the bills from the last 3 months in the filing cabinet? (Of course, I say all this while I currently have a couple stacks of paper sitting on the kitchen counter not to mention my bedroom, but I try to do it with other things like laundry and just other general "stuff".)

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Originally posted by megmo:
My biggest problem is that I am a pack-rat. I just can't bring myself to throw things out. I develop sentimental attachments to candy wrappers, old movie posters, ticket stubs, beer mats, magazine ads, you name it.

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That is exactly me! On Clean Sweep, there was a homeowner who kept everything--kept lots of stuff for sentimental reasons and kept lots of other stuff to give to their kids one day. The organizer guy told them that becuase they were keeping so much stuff FROM the past and FOR the future, they weren't able to live IN today. Their lives were being run by "past" and "future" clutter. I thought that was a good point and it has helped me weed through lots of things.