Truth In Advertising Part II
After the bonding over how rarely we wash our sheets, I thought I’d post a little more truth around here because it seems maybe we all are guilty of assuming everyone else in the blog world is cleaner/prettier/more productive/more fit than we are. I know every time I see Pioneer Woman’s picture of her kitchen I want to punch myself in the face. I documented once how messy my kitchen looked after a set of food-related projects, but I thought I’d show you what it looks like on a normal day. Now, I do “clean” it either right before bed or first thing in the morning, just so that at some point it’s a fresh slate, but it only takes half a day to make it look like a disaster zone again.
Let’s start with the sink area. As you can see below I have recycling stacked next to the sink that really should go to the recycling bin but it’s just SO FAR AWAY. (The recycling bin is in the adjacent laundry room. About 5 steps away from where I took this photo.) There are also dinner dishes soaking from the night before. I soak dishes after every meal because it means I can put off washing them for longer. Yet it looks like I’m at least making an effort.
Since we try to save energy by not doing the “heat” dry on our dishwasher, we always have a towel of clean dishes drying off next to the sink. Sometimes they sit there for a week before I finally decide to put them up. And sometimes there’s a sink full of dirty dishes next door because I just don’t feel like washing them when I’m just going to add more to the pile after the next meal.
And every room in my home has – at minimum – 3 hair clips on the floor. These three were all under the kitchen table.
And of course, every home has to have the Pile Of Crap We Were Carrying When We Came In The Door. Right? Purses, tote bags, dance bags, jackets…the usual. That piles just changes throughout the day, never completely disappearing.
And then my favorite pile of all…The Pile Of Trash That Won’t Fit In The Garbage Can And I Don’t Feel Like Taking It Out Right Now. That piles just grows until I finally decide it’s time to take out the trash. Then, when I pull the bag out of the can there’s always room and I cram all of that pile in the top of the bag. CLASSY.
So…be honest. How does my kitchen on a normal day compare to yours? Are we going to bond like we did over not washing our sheets for weeks or are you going to run away screaming?
Thank you SO MUCH for this post! Your kitchen looks a lot like mine, except that mine is messier, so don’t fret.
I, too, feel pretty dang inadequate when I see/read/think about other people’s lives and I wonder when they have the time/energy/motivation to keep things so perfect when I can barely keep the trash out.
I think I just fell in love with you. <3
No, seriously. LOVE.
I've been reading your blog for years and I just never had a sense that you were completely and totally like the rest of us. I just KNEW your kitchen/house was spotless always, despite your posts to the contrary.
Thank you for this! I feel so normal now.
My kitchen looks very similar, except replace the area of recycling with a huge pile of mail and craft projects my kid made at daycare.
I’m pretty good about dishes, but the splatters on the stove surface from cooking…eh, not so much. Nor do I really deal with the spoon rest often enough so its usually dirty. And replace all the recycling with a stack of mail/coupons/important papers and it looks lots like mine. Oh, and we have lots of fur tumbleweeds under the cabinets. I could vaccuum daily and they’d still be there.
Wow, my kitchen/house if very similar in terms of mess. There is always a pile of recycling on one of the counters because we also are too lazy to walk the few steps to the recycling container. And my husband REFUSES to take the trash out when it’s full, he is a crammer, crams so much in that I can’t get the dang thing out of the can so that extra pile of garbage that won’t fit piles up too. We don’t have a dishwasher so there is always dishes in the sink waiting for someone to come along and wash them (the kids must think there is a dish fairy). I too “soak” the pots and pans before washing them.
Our dining room table is the catch all place for purses, gym bags, back packs, mail, etc…we never eat there so it’s always piled with stuff that needs to be put away somewhere else. My pet peeve is the husband who takes off his shoes in the middle of the living room and lets them lay there…sometimes 3 or 4 pairs….WTF?
This is much much cleaner than mine. I can’t even seem to get rid of just the clutter in my kitchen. We have the dishes all done at the moment, but we still have the tote from halloween in there, and then there is all the guinea pig supplies we haven’t found a home for, craft projects and supplies, it just gets more and more cluttered. Eventually no one fits in there and I can’t cook, so we all have to clean again.
I’m sorry, what were we talking about? I was too distracted by those gorgeous ceramic canisters next to your coffee maker. Tell me you didn’t get them from somewhere like Anthropologie, because I don’t have one of those stores anywhere near me and I’m not one of those people willing to pay a mortgage payment for shipping!
But back to your non-mess. I come home from work every day and my teenagers have turned my kitchen into Chernobyl. The dishwasher is either full of clean (waiting to be put away) dishes or completely empty. There are dirty dishes and pans and garbage spilling from the counters into the living room…like I said, you have a non-mess. And nothing to worry about.
My kitchen would look very much like yours if my husband wouldn’t make me feel guilty about it. Though he doesn’t actually clean up messes himself, he likes to supervise “my” messes. He offers useful hints to me like, “you should clean AS you cook, not AFTER.” It’s SO helpful, and not irritating at all.
My kitchen looks just like that – right down to the dishtowel of drying dishes next to the sink. I don’t have hair clips, but my dining table always has to be cleaned off with the pile of stuff dumped when we come in the door. All our mail/coupons/other papers accumulate there and we usually have to move stuff in order to sit down and eat.
It’s funny – this is one area my husband and I argue over. He thinks other people all keep cleaner houses than we do. I think other people do exactly what we do – clean like mad before someone comes over. Nice to have some photographic evidence that we are not alone.
You have nothing to worry about there. My kitchen always looks like a bomb went off in there, even though I either clean it right after dinner if I’m feeling spunky or right before I go to work in the morning in the hope that it will be semi-clean when I get home. It never happens.
I too covet your cannisters!
You are officially on the VERY short list (that does not even include my mother!) of people who would be allowed to come into my house unannounced. I’m usually just too embarrassed for anyone to see my kitchen clutter. It’s usually just the dishes that are the problem and then the kitchen table is the center of the heap of “junk we were carrying when we walked in the door.” But oh my can that pile overtake everything and make me feel bad just looking at it… and yet I can never seem to get it handled once and for all.
Hmm…looks about right to me. But rather than putting our pile of “walk in the house and drop it” stuff on the floor, ours goes on the couch that we pass as we enter. And my kitchen is much smaller than yours, so although my piles may be equal in size, they seem to take over the space a little more. Or maybe they are just bigger. But I am going with “my house is small”
I was about to say the same thing about the canisters. Love them!
My kitchen is a mess when I cook. Because I do not clean as I go. Just don’t understand that logic. Anyway….the main countertop is always cluttered until I start throwing stuff away. But I have to have the sink cleared before bedtime.
One thing I would like to know, though. Does anyone else have the disappearing glasses & silverware? I kid you not, I bought new glasses and forks/spoons no less than 6 months ago. Look in the cabinet or dishwasher and there are maybe 5 glasses. Where do they all go?!?
Oh. Man. My kitchen looks just like yours (well, I assume … my stupid work computer won’t show me the pictures, but from the descriptions, I’m guessing our kithcens are pretty similar). I too soak the dishes so I can put them off for longer, and we also have a towel next to the sink to dry dishes on (and it ALWAYS has something on it, because putting dishes away is just so TAXING). It drives my husband nuts, but after 2 years in this house, I think the counter looks weird without that towel.
Only difference is that our Pile of Misc. Crap is in the foyer, not the kitchen. Usually. Sometimes there’s overflow, if it’s been a paticularly rough week.
When I moved into my current house, I was absolutely nuts over the INSANE amounts of counter space. And all of the drawers and cabinets! Oh man! I could do all kinds of things with all that space.
It stayed “free space” for maybe a few weeks? Every single horizontal space in my kitchen is covered in SOMETHING. Mail. Purses. Clean dishes. Wedding presents still in packages because OH MY GOD what happened to all my space?
We added a desk to the kitchen, and, being a horizontal surface, it is buried in “stuff” 2 feet deep.
And we just bought our very first kitchen table, where I am sitting right now, with a laptop, two trivets that need to be washed, two empty soda bottles, half a Powerade, two plastic cups, an old iPhone, my sister’s BUTT PADS (I am not even kidding), and a bag of dog treats.
Soon I will get up and go insane and clean the entire place, only to have it back to the same condition within a week.
I didn’t realize how much constant – CONSTANT – upkeep having my own house would be. I give us all a pass.
Oh, and I have one of the same canisters! I use it to hold cooking spoons and stuff, and put the lid in a drawer, where it doesn’t quite fit, so the drawer never closes quite right, and I’ve left it that way. For months.
I swore that when we redid our kitchen I would keep the counters clutter free. Didn’t happen.
Where’s your pile of mail/bills/school stuff, etc.? That’s (currently) my biggest mess.
Looks very much like my kitchen! And we have a gigantic pile of shoes and backpacks by the front door…there’s only two of us…I don’t know how people keep it even presentable with more kids!
i had a neighbor that had a full time job and 2 small kids. Not a thing was EVER out of place in her house, and TRUST me, I kept popping in trying to CATCH her with SOMETHING, ANYTHING out of place and in 5 years, not once. I thought I hit the jackpot when I had to go over there to get something when they were out of town (we all had keys to each other’s house) and I was SURE that in their rush to leave, there would be something out of place. NOPE. SPOTLESS and perfect. I have NO IDEA how she did that.
With two sons I’m lucky if my counters stay tiny five minutes…. shoot never mind my counters, the rest of the house.
Er that would be tidy not tiny!
We have that same red stool, and the trail leading to it… Housework is overrated. Go read some Peg Bracken or Erma Bombeck, it’ll give you a laugh. Or Sylvia Plath, which won’t. But at least we’re not sticking our heads in the oven, eh? Just the dirty dishes (in my case at least).
http://wackymommy.org/blog/archive/2009/06/04/chores_by_nancy/
I love you, I love you, I love you!!! I feel so normal now, not only from your post but from your comments, too!
It doesn’t matter if I completely cleaned the kitchen and then stepped out to go to the bathroom. Within seconds there are two cups and some trash that just materialize!
Can never get ahead, except when hubby went out of town on business.
ah, looks like home. =)
Seriously. Every time I look at those pix again it just cheers me up. You are my coolest friend, Zoot.
Looks just like my house….for all the same reasons.
Looks about right to me
We definitely have a “dumping spot” with the entry way – plus it’s a terribly designed entry, well, I guess because it’s technically the side door to the house but we never use the front door but it’s awkward and strange and probably we need to remodel a bit!
My kitchen always has baby bottles and bottle parts drying on the counter. There’s always a pan sittin on the stove because I bake a lot for my kids and why put the pan up if you’re just going to use it later that day or the next morning for breakfast? I use tin foil or parchment paper so at least the pan stays clean. We try to wash dirty dishes right away because we have an ant problem (we live in old base housing so cracks are everywhere). Our huge kitchenaid mixer is on the counter because it’s too big for the counters. Our microwave is on the counter too. And then there’s the various lunch-making things that get left out because it’s easier…who has time to take 5 steps to the pantry and grab what you need? So yeah, my kitchen stays pretty messy, just like the rest of my house.
Meh. We have the same crock pot! Your kitchen isn’t messy, I don’t think. Mine tends to look the same after the end of a day when we’re all in and out constantly. It is, however, the one room that I’m compulsive about cleaning at the end of the day. I can’t stand waking up to it messy, because it’s the first room I really see when I head to make Maddie her breakfast.
But yup, your pictures pretty much show the same stuff as mine. Especially the recycling pile – ours is outside, so I tend to gather things throughout the day and then take them out at night with the (sometimes ridiculously overstuffed, as per your description) trash.
The light in our kitchen broke over a month ago, and we just finally replaced it last weekend. The new light is much brighter (the old one was way too dim), and I was HORRIFIED when we first installed it. Our door is covered in grimy fingerprints! The floor is disgustingly dirty! And the pile of dishes in the sink, the clean dishes next to the sink, and dishes that are drying after being run through the dishwasher on the other counter looked so much less… messy when it was dark.
My kitchen looks just like yours, except you’d have to add an overflowing compost container and several nasty ziploc bags, which I use to carry compost to and from work and then save to re-use.
Same here but worse! We have ‘homeless’ stuff on our island. I’m taking charge of the situation but with help. I gave up on Pioneer woman after step one, a clean sink will just never happen since I fall asleep the second I sit down. http://katystuff.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/more-clean-talk/
You don’t know how much I love you for posting this. I can SO relate.
I absolutely understand completely and decided to post a pic of my kitchen after seeing your bravery. Check it out: http://brandysjourney.blogspot.com/2010/11/commiserating.html
No running and screaming here, your matches mine. Mine just has more piles of glass recycle and plastic recycle. In the town I live in (I’m overseas) it’s mandatory separate everything for recycling. So we separate all paper, plastic, glass, food items, and whats left over goes in another bag. The plastic and glass we have to take down to the corner store and put it in the recycling bins. I get very lazy and it piles up like crazy. So don’t feel bad, I think your kitchen it pretty darn clean for a SAHM
We can totally bond because, well, we definitely have a “Pile Of Trash That Won’t Fit In The Garbage Can And I Don’t Feel Like Taking It Out Right Now.”
*nods*
You have the same crockpot as me! I am going to have to be the hated voice here when I say that my kitchen actually stays pretty clean. I’m super obsessive about cleanliness and the hubby is slowly starting to learn how to pick up after himself. We also had a German roach infestation (a BAD one) so I try to keep crumbs in the trash and such. Plus, we have no kids, and both work full-time, so we’re gone 10-12 hours a day. The office stays a disaster zone no matter when I clean it though.