I'm a well behaved gal these days (pearost alert)
A Proper Relationship can do that to you. But this was not always the case. Like most teenagers, my bedroom was my haven. A germ filled, cluttered haven. Schoolwork on top of CDs on top of uncleaned clothes on top of forgotten plates covered in greenish grey fur. I had purple carpet I hadn't seen in months - don't let a 13 year old pick their room colours. It's only going to go badly (although my brother's orange and leopard print theme would have put Graham Norton to shame, so I wasn't the worst one. Promise.)

Anyhoo, my mother, despite being a commune-minded hippy in a Gen X world (to this day she still takes people in who she thinks needs a bit of care, and partakes in smoking green stuff in her generally awesome way) kept the rest of the house spotless. We did the kitchen daily and some hoovering, so we did help, but the rest was all her.

One day, I spot some movement in the carpet. Well, I trod on something squishy - spotting would have been difficult. It's a cockroach! I'm terrified of all bugs and creepy crawlies, let alone the idea of a cockroach. I'll say that again: I'm terrified of all bugs. If you ever spot a wasp, I'll be heading onto a train to Cornwall to get a headstart on avoiding the fucker. After jumping and shrieking like the banshee-flid I am, I call my mum into the room.
Me: "Mum. Bug. What is it?"
Mum: "ahhh, that's a cockroach."
Me "Arrrggghhhhhhhhhhh" More banshee-flid freaking out. I'm imagining the cockroaches at night, climbing onto my legs, my face, waking up with a jolt after one climbs into my snoring gob.
Mum: "They can get everywhere, they can lay eggs anywhere y'know. I'll have to call the council."
Me: (fearing some local paper showing my room) "nooooooooooooooooooooooo"

So I clean. I chuck almost *everything* out. Most of my clothes, save 1-2 loads. My mattress (imaging hatching cockroach eggs in my mattress made me squirm), my bed (I had a divan. It's fabric, so eggs go there too). I couldn't bring myself to chuck my books, thankfully. My bedlinen was cleaned at 90C with a lot of bleach thrown in. Everything gets covered in neat bleach. The gap between the floor boards and the skirting board gets bleach poured in all the way round my room.

Eventually, I was left with a bare shell of a room. I had no bed. I had barely any clothes. My throat hurt from the fumes of unwisely mixing cleaning chemicals together. But there were no bugs. I was an accomplished arthmelow. I calmed down a bit. Well, at least for a few hours. The next day I spotted white residue on my toolbox (yay! lego!), went "ARGH EGGS", and poured more bleach on. Took me a while and a few goes to work out it was the dried up bleach, not more cockroach eggs. After about 6 months of sleeping on the floor, I stole my brother's old mattress, and about 4 years or so after that, I managed to purchase a bed along with some new flooring. Not too long after that, we move and I move out.

A few years along the line, I bring it up in conversation. My mum cracks up laughing
"It was a water beetle. There's a nest under the house. We only said it so you'd tidy up your room."
"So you let me go without a bed for 4 years because you wanted me to tidy my room?"
"Well, it worked, didn't it?"

The woman is a mental. But thinking back, it *did* work...
Which woman was the mental one I'll leave up to you.
(mmmm curry doesn't really understand this sig lark, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:12, 1 reply)

New house ruined..
We moved abroad and built our own beautiful home to just the specification we wanted 3 years ago. we live in the country and have an aversion to housework. It's clean enough at first glance, but Mrs Rickormortis and me have decided we work too hard and life is too short for cleaning windows (constantly a bit dirty, obscuring the triffic view) and tops of doors and corners of rooms and that bit that gets a bit grimy under the front of the cooker and that cobweb on the ceiling and under the sofas and behind the fridge and on top of the wardrobes and that. Fuck it. Quality time is not to be ruined by that shit.
(Rickormortis My wife does my stunts for me, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:11, Reply)

My mum cleaned my brother's room
and found a pool of maggots at the bottom of his wastebasket. He nearly cried when she showed him because he has a phobia of parasites.
( Bob Todd whee, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:09, 4 replies)

Dominoes
When I was a student we ate alot of takeaway pizza. In a moment of genius (?) during out third year we decided to start storing up our empty dominoes boxes so that we could eventually have a large game of dominoes with our dominoes.

Yeah. Genius.

Length? Well the line stretched from the bathroom, along the corridor, down the stairs, through the hall and into our kitchen.
(Psymon_Spark Jesus Saves! The rest of you take 4d6 damage, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:06, Reply)

Vacuuming.
My house is reasonably clean but I hate vacuuming with a passion, I always have and I always will. It’s noisy and stressful and I always think I can hear the phone ringing or somebody calling my name, so I stop to investigate but it’s always just my brain messing with me. To do it properly you have to move all the furniture and go around the edges with that horrible bendy hose attachment thing that sucks itself to the carpet and devours any curtains foolish enough to get in the way…and that’s just one room done, you have to do upstairs…oh god the stairs…more horrible bendy attachment thing that makes the pfffut-pfffut-pfuttt noise because it wants to eat the carpet not clean it and is that my mobile ringing? Need to stop and check but I can’t find the damn thing because I’ve turned the living room upside-down vacuuming and nothings where it should be.

And that’s vacuuming.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:05, 7 replies)

Clean house? Honestly, living with my girlfriend is like living with Howard Hughes
Not that the house is particularly clean. She just poos in jars and never cuts her hair or nails. She also built the world's biggest plane out of wood once. The mad bastard that she is.
(Crayola Oblongata Is it Monday?, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:05, 1 reply)

We've shat up a brand new house in just 3 years...

(Rickormortis My wife does my stunts for me, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:05, 1 reply)

I shared a place with a mate
Our house was spotless during the week, but come the weekend...

Christ almighty you'd think a bomb has been dropped judging by the state of the place, every weekend for about 6 months of the year the place would get trashed, this was usually down to us having various people over to stay.

Thing is by the following weekend it was spotless again.

Strange place, given the state of the decor (garish 1970's wallpaper) and purple carpet but it was a great. Oddly, the longer we lived there the more living space we had (at one point we found a basement that had a cage in it).

We moved in the end, following hassle from the police.

Nae body move!

Pc Harry Batt was constantly on our case over stolen Muck-Muck.

Cheers,

D
( JeffTheDogFucker Can you dig it?, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:05, Reply)

How I almost cleaned, but didn't
When I moved out of my old flat I went through the usual process of looking under the furniture to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, uncovering mountains of dust, CD cases, old newspapers etc. in the process. I had finally packed everything I intended to keep and reckoned I was looking at a solid day's cleaning, if not two days, to get the place looking shipshape. The landlord then turned up and said "Don't bother tidying the place - we're going to rip everything out once you've gone and redecorate completely."

So that was nice.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:04, Reply)

Oor hoose
Our house is a haven for filth. 2 guys in one house doesn't really work. I'm too lazy to bother putting any binbags into our swing bin so I just throw in tea bags, old food and the like without lining it....eventually empty it 2 months later. I have to scrape the stuff from the bottom of the bin which has then turned black with furry god knows what. Our cooker is filthy. Too much hassle to clean. I'm scared to look behind the fridge. The floor is covered in crushed pasta shells, old burnt chips, chopped onions which have fallen on the floor when I'm chopping them. The walls are getting mouldy. Our upstairs window is covered in black mould which we've tried to get rid off, but our heating bust over winter and the dampness just spread round the house like wildfire. eventually got the fucking thing replaced in the beginning of March.

Think I may tidy up this weekend, but then again, I may figure, fuck it then go to the pub....what do you lot think?
(scotsbloke, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:03, 7 replies)

Holiday appartment
I just had a short break in Barcelona with two friends. K and I kept our stuff in our bedrooms and cleared up after ourselves. A, however, covered every available surface in the communal areas with her stuff ( got snitty with me when I asked if I could sit somewhere) and covered the floor with discarded shoes.

On top of this one of us ended up cleaning the toilet everytime she used it and she also flooded the appartment everytime she had a shower - it was the shower's fault, apparently, although we managed to stay dry.

K and I have made a pact now - if one of us ever thinks about going away with A again the other must talk her out of it!

Yes, we should have known better.
(misspiggy In danger of having to get a job, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:01, Reply)

Kitchen at Uni
I'm living in Uni halls at the moment and we have kitchen inspections every couple of weeks. We used to be good at cleaning the kitchen but recently we have failed a few inspections, and have not been charged for them cleaning it, so it is mostly left to the cleaners now.

We reached a new bin hight record the other day... 30 cm from the ceiling.

img709.imageshack.us/img709/9532/photowu.jpg
(eggs and spam *insert witty sig here*, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:00, 11 replies)

"Alas, a QOTW I can finally answer", I thought.
I planned out what I wanted to say, looked up supporting facts on Wikipedia. Had everything in the right order in my head, and thought I'd give it just one more day to see if I could think of anything else.

That was yesterday, today there's a new QOTW, and it's another crap one. ARGH!
(WillF http://www.flickr.com/photos/silverfischdotnet/, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:58, 1 reply)

I have a cockatiel.
Whenever I decide to move furniture around, I find little black and white reminders that I'm not as good at cleaning up after him as I thought I was.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:57, 1 reply)

Speaking of dishes.....
I am your average general bloke. I make something, I put the pot in the sink. I eat what I've made, then put the plate in the sink. Repeat until sink looks full/plates run out, then do dishes.

My dad does dishes about twice as often as I do, so I really shouldn't complain, but he's driving me slowly mad with his insane ideas about kitchen tidiness.

When stuff's in the sink, at least it's out of the way. He will use a knife to spread butter on something, then drop it on the worktop and leave it. Spoons, knives, caps from milk cartons...... the sink and bin are literally arms length away. This isn't the most annoying thing though. No.

If I put a pot in the sink, to soak, say, he will REMOVE IT FROM THE SINK AND SIT IT ON THE COOKER. Why? Why does he do this? Why why why? It's driving me insane. Often there are two or three pots full of scummy water sitting on the hob, which have to be TRANSPORTED BACK TO THE SINK TO BE WASHED! WHYYYYYYYY?

He seems to think a good rinse will clean even the most grime-caked things too. I need my own place.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:54, 12 replies)

Hello out there
One of my friends (a regular reader of b3ta) lived with four stubborn stoner geeks for a couple of years.

He used to consider his house tidy when you could walk across the living room without stepping on some chips.

C'mon Brob... I know you're there. Own up.
(cypherspace is not a toaster, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:52, 3 replies)

Not mine but...
A mates house. When I was a young un I used to be mates with a lad whos mum was obsessed that the house should be perfect. I remember one time we actually got into a full on fist fight because i had stood on the tassles of the living room carpet. They were slightly out of place and his mum was going to go ballistic. Looking back, maybe it was my mate who was obsessive and not his mum.
(Andino, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:49, Reply)

It's amazing ...
... how being married and living with somebody changes one's outlook on these things. Left to my own devices I tend to have a 6-monthly climatic cycle, where my environment starts out spotless, gradually deteriorates to utter squalor, at which point a 3-day decontamination process ensues and it goes back to being spotless.

Now that I'm happily married and have somebody around every day who would see that I spend half of my life living in a fetid shit-hole, the sense of embarrassment and shame means I keep the place tidy most of the time.

I still miss the couple of days after a massive clear-up/decontamination. It was satisfying, somehow. Like a cold drink after you've run a marathon or a warm bath after you've been out in the cold all day. Now I just live in a constant state of mediocre mostly-tidiness.

Meh.
(Mr T, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:49, 1 reply)

Every thursday since my mum passed away three years ago,
my auntie comes to our house to do the housework. While we do keep on top of stuff like dishes and washing, it seems to be beyond us to do any dusting, hoovering or general tidying up.

I honestly don't know where we'd be without her. Buried under mounds of opened post, I imagine.

She's here now, I can hear her busily going through our house like a tornado.

It's a bit pathetic really, but there you go. My Dad's an old fashioned "housework is for wimmin" type and I keep my mess confined to my room, where none shall tread but me.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:47, Reply)

Our Kitchen at Uni Halls...
was infested by several different types of insect from about a month into our collective tenancy. It was about 200yds from the Cambridge Uni Museum of Zoology, so thankfully some of them were great at stripping the meat from the bones of bits of kenchucky fried chicken dropped between cupboards and under the cooker when we had the munchies.

It was continually messy though, so much so that one of the Chinese students decided to set fire to it near the end of summer term... Ken Hom eat your heart out...

photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs105.snc3/15306_376891299066_633794066_3739336_6512614_n.jpg
(hengushrh is found at the Dole office every second thursday, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:41, Reply)

My husband insists on keeping that fleabitten moggy around
I don't care if he does wear boots, it was his fault that the last lord of this castle died, you know? Every day a new mouse or rat appears on the floor, and you know it was Puss who put it there like it was paved with gold or something. Mark my words, I'm getting a dog.
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:38, Reply)

the TexasPete mantra.
Clean Not Tidy!
(TexasPete enjoyed being sexually molested by your Father on, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:31, Reply)

I think my flat is clean
But then again, I have 12 dead mice on top of my cooker as I'm typing this.
(Mensa Reject has gone out, I'll be back on, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:25, 2 replies)

Time Delayed Cum Shot
Whilst at Uni in London, my friend Paul moved in to the recently vacated spare room at another mate’s house.

Before he could move his stuff in, he had to clear out the detritus the previous guy had left behind.

Whilst emptying the contents of the wardrobe into black bags, he found a rubber fanny wrapped up in a carrier bag.
Being the curious fellow he is, instead of instantly discarding it in the bin like a normal person, he decided to unwrap it and have a good look at it and to see how it works.

Whilst holding it up to the light to see how the vibrating mechanism was sited, a thick globule of old jizz rolled out of the rubber minge and dropped onto his face.

He claims not to have tried using it.
( Dervel OTBC, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:25, 4 replies)

I work in regional TV news....
We have lists like Top 10 smelliest houses you've ever filmed in. A recent new entry was the old boy in his 70's who chained smoked the whole time I was there and had cardboard sheets attached to the inside of the bedroom windows. The atmosphere inside was cloying and the smell just stuck in the throat.
The reason we were filming him? HE COLLECTED VACUUM CLEANERS!! FFS!!

Tha all time smelliest house was the woman who ran a hedgehog rescue centre in her house. She had 250 of them in her house, every room had at least 30 of them including the kitchen where the hedgehogs slept in rotting, piss soaked cardboard boxes on work surfaces. The smell of sulphur was overpowering. I made an excuse to go back to my car so I could hurl chunks.
She asked me if I would like a cup of tea, then looked surprised as I shouted "NOOOOOOO" very quickly.
(Barnetboy, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:24, Reply)

Missus Defective and I do the cleaning in our underpants
Last weekend we decided to crawl out of bed, realsied the place was a complete mess and decided that the only option waws to have a quick tidy around, the quick tidy around progessively turned into an intensive cleaning session, really it took the two of us two hours to clean a bathroom that is no more than 6ft by 12ft. Once we'd tag teamed the bathroom and considered ourselves filthy from scrubbing the piss laiden bathroom floor we deceided what the fuck... no point in getting fresh cloths dirty now and no point in having a shower until we finished with the kitchen bedrooms and livingroom. Before we knew it the time was 15:00 and we were stinky sweaty exhausted and half naked, on the plus side though you feel really clean after getting clean in a really clean bathroom.
(TwinkleFuckingToes Has a ingrown toe nail, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:23, 4 replies)

As usual
Messy yet clean.

Lots of wires, papers, books, clothes lying around here and there.
(Archeleus hates cabbage, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:18, Reply)

Yes
It's very tidy....next
(bROKEN aRROW PUA HVI Master, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:12, Reply)

Unlurks for this one
Not quite our house.....but our dad did vacuum the interior of our old car before it was towed to the scrapyard
(Lord Blumpy is mildly off-topic on, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 14:11, 1 reply)