KS&L 310 House Creep Part 1

Everyone is living very busy lives these days and managing a house of any size is a challenge. The busier you are, the more easily House Creep can begin to take over.

House Creep is that unseen, unheard, unnoticed take-over of things in anyone’s house [or yard, or car or office] by – well, the House Creep. House Creep is a feeling, a person, an action and a sense. It starts everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time. So, let us examine a typical day and see what and how this is.

You wake up, begin to do hair, makeup or, shave and then dress. You are busy, so you don’t make your bed. You stumble over the shoes you took off from the night before, as you look for a scarf or tie a to wear. You have to rummage through a pile of clothes to find it, desperately wishing that you had put it away, the last time you used it. You can’t remember if the clothes on the pile are clean or dirty. Can’t find what you are looking for, so you pick out something else. You almost trip on the wet towels from last night. You are now late, so you hurriedly remove your nightclothes and they drop to the floor. Your dog smiles at you and curls up in your nightclothes, happy to find a still warm bed that smells delightfully like you.

As you dash into the kitchen for a quick breakfast there are dishes in the sink from last night’s broiled fish. Lovely scent that is! Well, you’re too busy to clean that up now. Gulp down tea or coffee, swallow yogurt or a breakfast bar and off you go to the car. More dishes left in the sink.

Your car smells like the previous day’s sour coffee, left over from yesterday morning when you had no time at all for breakfast. As you throw you briefcase in the passenger’s seat, you notice the mail you forgot to bring in the house last week. To your horror, you notice that your credit card bill is due. Have to take care of that later.

You toss your breakfast bar wrapper on the floor of your car and hurry into work. Your desk Creep greets you: the paper piles precariously perched in such a threatening way are cause for concern. Heaven help you if you have an earthquake, you’ll never find anything again!

You return home at the end of the day, exhausted from the work pace and the clutter that surrounds you and everyone else you work with. You plop down in a chair and turn on TV. However, you cannot enjoy your TV show, because you smell sour milk. Finally you realize that that smell is coming from the glass on the table next to you that you didn’t finish before you went to bed. You couldn’t find it at first because it was covered with newspapers.

You go upstairs to put on something comfortable and you drop your clothes on the floor, too exhausted to determine whether they are clean or dirty. Once on the floor, though, they are going to smell like dirty clothes for sure, especially after the dog nests in them.

Time to make supper, so you have to clean up last night’s dishes to even get to the sink. You wipe away the ants who have invaded the fish smell. You decide that you have to do better because it is no fun to live like this. There are piles of papers everywhere, there is just ‘stuff’ all over the place whether it is magazines, newspapers, overcoats, sweat pants, smelly work out clothes and mats, possibly toys and on and on. You can’t remember the last time that any of your counters, your car or heaven help you, your garage were clean.

If you have a spouse and kids, you also have multiple House Creep and creeps. Add to this mix, your animals. Didn’t make your bed? Maybe your cat left you a hairball as a present on your pillow. Cats, bless them, do that.

As the House Creep escalates, you find that your house feels dirtier and messier, and you feel like you have less and less time. As a subtle sense of loss of control grows, you find you are becoming increasingly irritable with the creepy way your life looks to you and you are not at all happy with your finances. AARGH! Time to kick the Creep out!

Part 2: removing the Creep!