You’re Better Than Your Mess
As my husband and I have started house hunting and I may have a bit of a… collecting problem, I figured it was high time I got my butt in gear and started working on developing useful and effective cleaning and organizing habits!
Synopsis
From the Back Cover
Finally, a housekeeping and organizational system developed for those of us who’d describe our current living situation as a “f*cking mess” that we’re desperate to fix. Unf*ck Your Habitat is for anyone who has been left behind by traditional aspirational systems. The ones that ignore single people with full-time jobs; people without kids but living with roommates; and people with mental illnesses or physical limitations. Most organizational books are aimed at traditional homemakers, DIYers, and people who seem to have unimaginable amounts of free time. They assume we all iron our sheets, have linen napkins to match our table runners, and can keep plants alive for longer than a week. Basically, they ignore most of us living here in the real world!
Interspersed with lists and challenges, this practical, no-nonsense advice relies on a 20/10 system (20 minutes of cleaning followed by a 10-minute break; no marathon cleaning allowed) to help you develop lifelong habits. It motivates you to embrace a new lifestyle in manageable sections so you can actually start applying the tactics as you progress. For everyone stuck between The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Adulting, the philosophy is more realistic than aspirational, but the goal is the same: not everyone will have a showcase of a home, but whatever your habitat, you deserve for it to bring you happiness, not stress.
Review
I’ve never been good a cleaning or keeping my room/dorm/apartment particularly tidy. I love to organize, but I’m not always so good at maintaining said organizational systems. I struggle with anxiety and I often will retreat into bed rather than clean. So needless to say, I could use some help, some real help, not my mother-in-law wanting to throw everything away.
I started listening to Unf*ck Your Habitat one Sunday afternoon while my husband and I were cleaning and I spent all of my allotted cleaning time doing the dishes. One should not have to spend and hour doing dishes. And that is when I finally admitted I had a problem.
I appreciate Rachel’s approach of adopting small changes over a period of time and not expecting yourself to develop a whole new cleaning mentality overnight. Her dissuasion from marathon cleaning also makes a great deal of sense. The chapters are laid out sensibly and also include ways to handle organizing your space for a variety of different living situations.
Additionally helpful is the chapter on emergency cleaning (which I find myself doing before my MIL comes over) as well the chapter on how to set up fresh cleaning habits when moving – and given that we have just put an offer in on our first house, it is incredibly helpful. So if you’ve watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix and feeling overwhelmed, give Rachel’s Unf*ck Your Habitat a try. And even if you don’t want to dive right into the book, I found her website tremendously helpful as well.
Rating: 10 out of 10 stars
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