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Can I just spend a minute to gripe about “cleaning” by stashing stuff away in the wrong place?

+ It becomes clutter in its temporary home making the things that belong there harder to see or access.

+ You’ll have to go looking for it when you need it which may take orders of magnitude more time than just putting it away properly. (And if you really need it and can’t find it you might buy another one, causing more clutter and costing money.)

+ Even if you remember where you put it you have to handle it twice to get it where it belongs, reducing efficiency over time.

I’m a huge believer in having things have a place they belong and making that process efficient. Every day frequent use things get priority.

My parents have dozens of (re-usable) plastic cups that just sit precariously balanced in a cupboard. They do use them for the occasional party but mostly they’re just a menace when you want a glass of water.

Solution 1: Keep 4 (or 6 or 8) cups in the cupboard. Store the rest in a box under the stairs until you need them for a party.

Solution 2: Re-home the extras completely and use Solo cups for parties. (Even ignoring the benefit of the extra space, this might be cheaper over time unless you really can’t leverage the space the plastic cups take by, say, buying consumables in bulk on discount.)

You shouldn’t be handling (or potentially handling) things you rarely use in order to access things you use every day.

Physical space has a use besides just storing more stuff…

This is 100% describes my situation and I'm saved by the luxury of people coming to clean my home and reset it.

Separately, I need to clean my fridge because then I can follow your great advice XD

Make sure to clean everything that was inside the fridge before restocking or you reset your progress

Unfortunately (assuming you love with your partner), this takes relational work as much as actual cleaning work. If one of you lived in a larger house previously or maybe you have food insecurity or maybe you attach sentimental value to things you aren't actually using or maybe you see "getting your kid more things" as valuable to your self-esteem or maybe you're getting things because you plan to do something with it later (and repeat this multiple times), following this advice can be much harder than getting another shelf to put stuff or a robo-vacuum.

This work is still worth doing of course, but sometimes it requires a lot of mental work (dare I say healing) from one or both partners.

I guess my point is that switching to this mindset can be hard; and it might not be up to you.

I do really like this comment; I think it's really valuable when couples get on the same page about this.

>- Only clean things should be put in the fridge. If your shelves are dirty, it's because the bottom of the items you're placing on your shelves are also dirty. Do you let ketchup run down the side of the bottle? Is your counter dirty, and you've set a clean bottle of salad dressing on a dirty counter? In both cases, you have transferred dirt and/or oil into the fridge on the shelf. And then this compounds multiple times: do you always put the ketchup in a different place? Well now you've spread around the dirt. Do you clean the fridge but bot the bottom of the ketchup bottle? Well, now your clean fridge is immediately dirty again the moment you reload it.

This sounds like some useful advice but misses the bigger picture. What about the dust from the day to day of just being alive? I just wiped down my face wash and other toiletries on my bathroom shelf. They were already clean, they didn't have latent "material" from the bottle dripping on its side, yet when I cleaned it with a soapy sponge, the bottle became shiny again like it was brand new. It accumulated dust that got trapped on there due to the hot/cold cycle of a bathroom with a shower in it. You can think of essentially any location on the planet...it will get dirty and is naturally cleaned by either the weather or by humans putting in the effort.

Thats not to say there isn't wisdom in this advice, Marie Kondo talks about how each item is an additional burden. In our consumerist culture the act of purchasing an item is the only value many items our lives end up having. Maybe an item only kinda serves a purpose and needs to be paired with another item to be complete (Example: a shaver that is a cheaper model that doesn't quite serve all shaving needs but does do many of them)

>So many "messes" in the house are compounding problems; the worse you let it get, the bigger the problem you've made for yourself. Didn't put away the kid's toys? Well now you can't sweep that area. Can't sweep that area? Well now you can't mop that area. etc. One solution, which people might not think about with regard to cleaning would actually just be to make sure the kid has fewer toys, or at least fewer _available_ toys. If you nail this, the clutter --> sweeping --> mopping cascade starts improving without any additional work on your end.

Where does this end? Why not own anything? If you only own digital items then that itself gets cluttered and messy. Life is a series of maintenance tasks and then you die.

Digital clutter has its own costs, (mostly attention) so I'd say at least go down one more turtle.

I addressed that, the point is that your advice does not really solve the underlying issue: dirtiness and clutter is a part of life and the act of maintenance (of which cleanliness is a form) is just life itself.

Also, don’t live with a cat (or a dog I presume).

I own a robot vacuum mainly because the floor gets hair in just a few hours. It doesn’t alleviate me from cleaning, but it improves the baseline.

> If your shelves are dirty, it's because the bottom of the items you're placing on your shelves are also dirty.

I live in a humid climate. If I take something out of the fridge, set it on a clean counter for five minutes, and put it back in the fridge without wiping it down it'll leave smudges of water and dust on the trays. The trays will look dirty after a few months even if I only put clean things in there.

"I'm 22, single, and live in a small apartment. Here's 10 things you are doing wrong as a homeowner with kids"

I'm 40+, have two kids under two, and I'm the parent who is doing the most cleaning. The problems I outlined in the example were _always_ true in my household, but the added stress of two kids have made the flaws in our process that much more clear. ie, we could do a fine enough imperfect job before we had any kids. With one kid it was busy but do-able, and with two kids I'm trying to get the household to rethink how we tackle this.

I didn't use kids in my example to preach to parents. I used it because it's painfully top of mind for me currently.