Unfuck Your Habitat

So you cleared off your dining room table! Or possibly your bedroom floor, or that kitchen counter that seems to breed random crap. It’s nice, right? Gives you a sense of accomplishment to look at? And then, even though you try to stop it, that obnoxious little voice tells you to enjoy this moment, because it’s just going to be covered in crap again in a day or two. I know you know that voice.

Here’s the thing: the accumulating crap doesn’t happen on its own. It’s a passive phenomenon, in a way, but only in that you’re the one being passive. An unfucked area is not going to remain that way by itself. And that’s where the reset comes in.

Here’s how it works:

1. Figure out your most problematic surface.
2. 20/10 it into submission until it’s clean and cleared of everything that shouldn’t be there.
3. Then take two to five minutes every day and reset it back to that perfect state.

Those messes don’t generally happen overnight. And they usually only get worse the longer you leave them. So by taking just a few minutes every day to reset the surface back to clear, you never give it the chance to accumulate the multiplying crap. And by sacrificing a handful of minutes (do it while the coffee’s brewing, or during a commercial break) each day, you can pretty much guarantee you won’t have to face a mountain of crap on that surface again.

And admit it, there’s something so satisfying about seeing your worst surface completely clear. You should be able to feel that satisfaction every damn day.

I think that they set you up for failure, and I’m not a fan of encouraging failure. Resolutions are generally sweeping, dramatic changes made on a day when there’s a social expectation to get your act together one way or another, and that’s not a recipe for success. That’s a recipe to marathon clean, and we all know that’s not sustainable in the long term.

So let’s not make resolutions. Let’s change habits. Habits take a while to change, so this is not a “do it for a few weeks and then stop because what a pain in the ass, right?” kind of thing. This is about trying to make tiny, incremental, easy changes, and to motivate ourselves to keep up with those changes past January, into the spring and summer and then have them be so ingrained that we can’t remember ever having done differently.

If you’re determined to have a New Year’s resolution, keep it reasonable. Start slow. One or two 20/10s a day. (Not sure what that is? Check out the welcome packet.) Follow the prompts to make your bed, unfuck tomorrow morning, and go to sleep. Don’t expect that by January 5th, your house will be immaculate and all of your problems will be solved. Be realistic. Know what’s sustainable for you. Know that it’ll take time. And know that you are not beyond help.

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: for whatever reason, someone is coming to your house. And you’re in a complete panic, frantically cleaning whatever you can get to as quickly as you can, just so the house will be “company ready” for your guests.

Here’s a serious question, though: why do your guests deserve to have your house look nice more than you do? They’re only there for a small fraction of time; you’re there every day. Why don’t you deserve to have the place looking nice and neat and clean?

Maybe you think, “Oh, I’m just a messy person, so I don’t care about the mess, but my visitor will.” If you truly didn’t care, you wouldn’t be scrambling to clean up before someone crosses the threshold. You’re speed-cleaning because you do care, just not enough to make it nice for yourself. You need to cut that out.

Focus on making your house “you ready.” Bring it, gradually, up to your standards of cleanliness. Make it so that you’re comfortable, and so that you enjoy looking around your home. When you reach that point, your house will always be company ready. You’re the most important person who will step through your door. Try to make your living space reflect that.

even if you don’t post them.

Taking pictures of your spaces is a valuable tool for unfucking. When you’re in the same space every day, your eyes don’t always register everything that’s going on within that area. When you take a “before” picture, you remove yourself one step from the environment and can turn a more critical eye to it. You can see things that are out of place or problem areas that you didn’t notice before.

“After” pictures are just as useful, because now you have a baseline to compare that space to. When it starts to get messy again (and it will; unfucking is a continuous process), you can look back at the picture of it freshly unfucked and see what you need to do to get it back to that state. Also, it reminds you that it’s not hopeless or insurmountable; you did it once, and you can do it again.

Plus, comparing the “before” to the “after” feels awesome. If you can see how much progress you’ve made, you can really feel proud of the work you did.

I’ve seen a number of people on Tumblr and Twitter lately refer to UfYH as “FlyLady without the _____.” (With various things in that fill-in-the-blank.) So I feel like I should get my FlyLady opinions on record.

FlyLady is the primary reason I was able to even get a grasp on unfucking in the first place. I did FlyLady on and off for quite some time, and while the set-a-timer-take-a-break method isn’t exactly revolutionary (see: Pomodoro method), it works. The encouragement from the site itself kept me from drowning in my own filth. The issue I had (besides the site design, which has since been revamped and looks great) was the community. I felt like I didn’t belong because I wasn’t (at the time) married, I have no kids, I’m not religious, and (this was the big one) I work full time. It’s hard to modify that system when you’re out of your house for 10-12 hours a day, and it’s tough to relate when there’s so much talk of blessing your house and blessing your family when you aren’t religious.

Unfuck Your Habitat is born out of trying to find a system that works for the rest of us: students, single people, people with roommates, people with full-time jobs, people with two jobs, people with physical limitations or mental illness, people who are maybe a little younger and a lot more liberal, but still want to live somewhere we can enjoy and be proud of.

FlyLady started out in the early-ish days of the Internet. She used the tools available at the time: group emails, a fairly basic-looking website. And she did it really really well. How can I have anything but admiration for a woman who started out with a message board and an email list and grew it into a multi-million dollar empire? That’s entrepreneurship at its most elemental. From everything I know, Marla (FlyLady) is an incredible human being, and she’s built a system that works for a huge number of people. Most of those people fit into a fairly particular mold: stay-at-home moms who go to church regularly. I’m just looking for a different system for a different demographic. I have nothing but respect for FlyLady and what she’s done. So, while my system may work better for you, I get a little uneasy when people have unkind things to say about FlyLady. I don’t like spicy food. Doesn’t mean it’s not good. Just means it’s not for me. 

Marathoning is bad for a few reasons:

• It’s all or nothing. So, “all” is great, but the vast majority of the time, it’s “nothing.”
• It’s not sustainable. The good thing about cleaning in short, manageable chunks of time is that you can do it every day without it cutting into your life. You can’t do that with marathons.
• A lot of members of Team UfYH have physical or mental limitations that make marathons impossible. With many mental illnesses, manic episodes often manifest as cleaning sprees. It’s a switch of mindset to realize that cleaning can be just a little at a time.
• Marathons don’t build habits. Things get really bad and dirty, you marathon, then you wait for things to get really bad again. The time in between, you’re not sustaining a clean environment.
• The whole point of UfYH is that doing something is better than doing nothing, and every little bit you do helps. Marathons sort of spit in the face of that logic.

UfYH is gender-neutral. I don’t buy into traditional standards of who “should” be doing cleaning. If you live somewhere, you deserve for that place to be nice and clean and livable, and you should be the one who makes it that way. I don’t care who you are or what box or boxes you check or don’t. I think gender roles as they relate to cleaning (well, in most ways, but that one’s relevant) are bullshit and just offer a handy excuse for half the population to be lazy and the other half to feel guilty.

Fuck that. We’re unfucking traditional gender roles here. Everyone plays.

If you have specific questions about stains, know that my answer will always be some combination of baking soda, vinegar, hot water, Magic Eraser, and a scrub brush. If you have a specific stain question, Google is a much better, faster, and more accurate resource than I am.

I’m the motivational support. The technical stain stuff has all been handled, and handled better, by other people.

I don’t like to invade other Internet spaces to defend myself or UfYH when someone takes exception to the site, but I do like to address those criticisms. Following the links from referral tracking, I came across this comment:

There’s a weird sort of void in the “taking care of your physical surroundings” stuff, in the archaic “how to keep a home” and “how to be domestic” arenas. It tends to ignore single people, or people without kids, or students, or people with pets, or people with roommates, or people with full-time jobs, or classes, or other shit going on. [From UfYH About page]

Or people who are physically incapable of doing housework. (That is me.) Or people who are on their feet all day in their jobs and/or in the service industry and therefore too  exhausted both physically and emotionally to do anything when they come home. (That was me.) Or people who are depressed — and therefore also incapable of doing housework. Or people who work two jobs. Or…

If I did not live with my fiance, and if I for some reason had my own apartment anyway, it would be an utter and absolute disaster, and I would be able to do nothing about it. I’m not unique. If you see someone with a home you think is dirty and feel like judging them, stop and think for a minute. First, what are your standards for cleanliness? Maybe they’re really high. Maybe you’re using a metric to judge them that assumes they have a comfortable income and someone who can spare a couple hours a day for housework. Second, does anyone want to live in a mess? (If they do, they likely have an issue like hoarding which you shouldn’t be judging them for anyway.) Do you honestly think people who do so are just “lazy”? Do you know so much about this person that you can know for a fact they aren’t exhausted from work/kids/relationships/life, that they don’t have any mental, emotional, or physical obstacles (including allergies), that they do have plenty of time and money that can be expended on housework and cleaning supplies? And remember, the cheaper your cleaning supplies are, the more physical ability and time it takes to clean. 

If someone has physical or emotional or mental or time challenges AND lack of money for fancy appliances and plentiful, fancy cleaning aids — here’s an idea. Instead of judging and instructing a la a late-19th century upper middle class reformer, offer to help them clean, or to clean for them.

The whole point of UfYH is to NOT judge other people’s messes, or the reasons that they came about or haven’t been dealt with. It’s about working within your own abilities, whatever the limitations, to improve things, even a little.

Anyone who says I don’t deal with how to handle housework and depression hasn’t read the blog. I don’t know what else to say about that. Click the “depression” tag and see what the archives have. It’s a subject we deal with all the time. Also the two jobs thing. And the physical disability thing. And the exhaustion thing. UfYH is about working within the limitations of those situations to improve your environment.

I don’t assume anyone has “a comfortable income and a couple of hours a day for housework.” I assume the exact opposite. I assume people have no time and no money, and operate based on those assumptions.

I don’t know. Usually criticisms don’t bother me this much, but I think because the commenter is judging this blog from a place that makes assumptions that go directly against everything I’ve ever stood for. UfYH exists for people who are overworked, underpaid, tired, sick, depressed, overwhelmed, and, on occasion, lazy. I’m not upper middle class, and I am offering to help you clean, the only way I can. Over the Internet.

I make reference to a lot of cleaning products, so I thought it might be helpful to have them all listed in one place.

Basics:

• Kitchen sponges
• Paper towels or rags
• Dishtowels or dishcloths
• Vacuum cleaner
• Mop and bucket
• Broom and dustpan
• Multi-purpose cleaner, like Lysol concentrate or something similar
• Bleach

Specifics:

• Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (Please note that Magic Erasers are made of melamine foam, which is essentially microgrit sandpaper, so it can wear away paint and other finishes, and it can also be a skin irritant. Wear gloves.)
• Swiffer dry mop if you have pets (or if you shed a lot). You can buy microfiber cloths if you don’t like the idea of the disposable ones.
• White vinegar
• Baking soda
• Bar Keepers Friend (the powder kind)
• Comet
• Zip-It (For clogged drains)
• Steam mop, if you’re so inclined (I have a base-model Shark)

I think that’s it, but I’ll add more if I think of any.

ETA: I realize everyone is going to have their favorite/most used products, but I was just making a list of things I reference frequently.