UNDERSTANDING THE LAYERS OF A CLEAN HOUSE
If your reaction to cleaning house seems to be vastly different from the reactions of your friends, it’s possible that cleaning your house involves peeling back layers that shouldn’t be there.
Before I understood these layers, my home was almost always a disaster even though I felt like I was always cleaning. I heard people laugh about how they hated cleaning so much they just never cleaned, but their homes always looked perfectly fine to me.
I now know we were talking about different things. Same words, different (like, completely different) things. There are layers to a clean house, but only one of those layers is actually cleaning.
I was talking about all three layers. They were talking about cleaning.
LAYER ONE: DAILY STUFF
If you read How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind, you know how much of a difference daily stuff made in my quest for a nondisastrous home. Honestly, the daily stuff made all the difference. I urge people who are completely overwhelmed to begin with the daily stuff.
When I wasn’t doing daily stuff daily, I thought cleaning meant catching up. For me, it did. To clean my house, I had to wash dishes and pick up randomness off the floor and off every flat surface. Sweeping the kitchen floor took at least an hour, because I had to clear it of the junk that collects if I’m not dealing with things like newspapers and empty coffee cans as they appear.
Dealing with daily stuff every day means that when it’s time to clean, you get to skip this layer. That makes cleaning so much easier and so much more likely to happen.
LAYER TWO: CLUTTER
The second layer is clutter. As you know from my clutter history, I had a lot of it. I assumed dealing with this stuff was cleaning, because when I cleaned, it was. Dealing with clutter was part of cleaning for me because I couldn’t sweep or dust with it there.
Layer two was the layer filled with angst. When I said I hated cleaning, I was talking about this layer. Decluttering requires effort and decision-making and moving past emotional blockades. This meant I put off cleaning as long as I possibly could, and when I was forced to clean because the doorbell was scheduled to ring, I dealt with the clutter level by boxing it up in the garage or shoving everything in the master bedroom and locking the door until whatever event I was cleaning my house for was over.
LAYER THREE: CLEANING
Layer three is cleaning. It’s counter-wiping and floor-mopping and surface-dusting and carpet-sweeping. And while it will never be fun, I still find myself shocked by how much easier it is when I don’t have to catch up on daily stuff and decluttering (or, honestly, Stuff Shifting) first.
When I had to clean bathrooms but hadn’t dealt with layer one (dirty clothes and towels strewn across the floor and random brushes and bottles strewn across the counters) or layer two (clutter with no place to go), this already unfun task was extra frustrating and more time-consuming.
I’ve had to accept that I can’t clean if there’s clutter everywhere. I won’t go into how to get the daily stuff under control. That’s what my other book is for. Just know that daily stuff builds on itself and, left undone, multiplies exponentially.
Cleaning and decluttering are not the same thing. And daily stuff isn’t cleaning either. But rather than let yourself get depressed over this fact of life, here’s some hope.
This book is all about layer two: decluttering. The beauty of focusing intensely on layer two is that it’s the only layer that lasts. Daily stuff has to be done every day for the rest of your life, and the effects of cleaning don’t last. Dust falls, toilets get used, and toothpaste splatters on the bathroom mirror. It never ends.
But once something leaves your house, it’s gone. And the more things leave, the more that layer becomes a non-issue and makes the other layers so much less overwhelming and quicker to tackle.
The layers of a clean house were amazingly simple once I understood what they were and how I was making my life more difficult by treating them as one big, overwhelming thing instead of as layers.
ONE MORE THING: PROCRASTICLUTTER
Ever feel like you’re staying on top of the mess, rocking and rolling with the stuff that is supposed to keep things under control, but your house still looks messy?
The culprit is most likely procrasticlutter.
Procrasticlutter is stuff that’s technically (if you’re into technicalities, which people with procrasticlutter usually are) not clutter. It’s the stuff that will be done one day because it will have to be done one day. It doesn’t feel like a daily task, but it also doesn’t feel like clutter, so it falls into no-man’s-land in the layers of a clean house.
Procrasticlutter, by definition, is made up of things that require no decisions. You already know exactly what to do with procrasticlutter; you just haven’t done it.
The most frequent examples of procrasticlutter are clean laundry piled on the couch and clean dishes in the dish drainer or the dishwasher. If the dishes are clean and usable, the task feels finished. If the laundry has been through both the washer and the dryer, it’s technically clean. And as someone who adjusts (too) easily to less than perfect situations, grabbing a coffee cup from the top rack of the dishwasher or a pair of socks from the pile on the couch doesn’t feel the least bit awkward, so the visible pile doesn’t register as a problem.
All this is fine, and life can totally go on this way. Clean dishes and clean laundry are significantly less significant problems than piles of dirty dishes or dirty laundry.
Except that a room with piles, even piles of clean stuff, doesn’t look clean. And piles of any kind are like fertilizer for other piles. Piles multiply. The existence of one pile justifies the existence of the next.
But what do you do about them? Well, um, stop procrastinating. The best way to prevent procrasticlutter is to avoid it in the first place. Make putting away clean dishes a part of your daily routine. Fold laundry as you take it out of the dryer or off the line, and put it away immediately.
But when you don’t (because if you’re anything like me, there will be times you don’t), don’t skip over procrasticlutter in the decluttering process (layer two). Dealing with procrasticlutter will come up again and again in every room we work through in this book.
Procrasticlutter needs its own explanation because even in the midst of decluttering mode, putting off dealing with it (procrastinating) makes so much sense. Shouldn’t I use my decluttering energy on real decluttering instead of on these tedious daily things?
Yes, except this daily stuff is clutter because you haven’t been dealing with it daily. If you dive into the tough decluttering stuff and ignore the procrasticlutter, you’ll feel like your efforts were wasted even though you worked all day. The room will still look messy.
But if you do the easy stuff first and deal with the procrasticlutter, at the end of the day you’ll see progress. The room will look better. Seeing progress is so much better than telling yourself you made progress even though you can’t see it.