I feel like my house is constantly a fucking mess. My wife and I work 80 hours between us and we have a 2 year old and I feel like it’s constantly a mess.
We do what we can and often spend a couple hours on a weekend tidying but it’s a losing battle.
How do you cope/keep on top of things?
We have a sign in our home. “Cleaning a house while kids are growing is like shoveling while it’s still snowing.”
We have a cleaning day once a week. Other than that, we let it be other than daily kitchen duty.
It’s a lot easier to shovel a foot of snow thrice than it is to shovel 3 feet of snow that’s compacted, melted down a bit, formed a freezing layer on top and ice on the bottom, and now your shovel is broke because you were trying to pry up that ice with 60lb of snow on top of it.
But at that point you say fuck it and just pay a guy to swing by with his plow and throw out some salt.
I appreciate the sentiment though.
I think the saying still works. For me, it feels like it’s a case of reframing it as an in-progress task rather than one that can be completed. It is easier to shovel one foot of snow thrice, but it can be demoralising to shovel a foot of snow and feel like you’ve made no progress.
In the context of tidying, it’s about clarifying what’s normal and reasonable to achieve. Tidy all the time clearly isn’t, but that doesn’t mean don’t tidy.
The idea being to clean the driveway of snow while it is still snowing means that immediately after, it’s covered in snow again.
This saying isn’t about volume.
Same here.
At home, me and the wife try to split chores as evenly as possible. When she was struggling with burnout, one of her problems is that the house explodes into a mess, thanks to two children. One of the advices she was given by her therapist, is to block a few minutes a day for the entire family just to do minor cleanup chores. The mess remains, but it feels a bit more manageable now.