**Disclaimer: if mess sets your teeth on edge, please don’t stress yourself out by reading this post. Instead spend the time you would have taken to read it (I reckon 5 hours would cover it) coming to help me sort it out**

I hate my house. There I said it. Not the actual building, not the decor (we’ve spent the last nine years plowing almost every spare ££ into doing it up, so that’s definitely not the case). But the STATE of my house drives me nuts.  It’s ALWAYS messy.  Let’s be clear, when I say messy, I mean MESSY. Not the sort of messy that, when you turn up on someone’s doorstep they say “oh, sorry about the mess” and you look and think “what mess?” (just me?). Not the sort of mess when you can clearly see that the children who live there have just had a fun morning pulling toys out. This is full-on-how-on-earth-do-you-let-it-get-that-bad-and-still-sleep-at-night-messy. The photos I’m posting will hopefully prove it to you – I’m so far from insta-worthy I need a double insta-gin and tonic.

Looking at the photos (these were taken tonight, but I could take them any night of the week and they’d look the same but different), you’d be well within your rights to think that we are a family of slobs and it doesn’t bother us. It can’t bother us, right, or we’d do something about it? Wrong. I am totally ashamed of our house. As a mum of two young kids, and fairly sociable (if I do say so myself), I would LOVE to be able to spontaneously ask people over…at the end of a playdate in the park, “hey, why don’t you come in for a cuppa?”, someone knocks to drop something off, “come in, we’ve just opened a bottle”. I would love that. But every time those potential occasions arise (which they do, frequently), I can’t give the invitation, or even worse, my kids dish out an invitation (“can so-and-so come in and play?), I have to squirm out of it with a, usually ridiculous, excuse. “Oh, sorry, we’ve still got holiday things drying (3 months after we got back from a week away); “oh no, don’t you remember, we have to take that library book back RIGHT NOW”.

Now, at the grand old age of 39, I’ve decided I’m too old for that crap. I want to live in a house that I’m proud of. As I said, this is the work of nine years and honestly, when it’s clean and tidy I looooooooooove my house. So, by my reckoning I’ve got two choices, I either embrace the chaos, stand atop my piles of clutter and welcome everyone to tiptoe between the junk on their way into the house, or I need to cut it out. Stop whining about the state of my house and start figuring out how to get a handle on it. Long term and once and for all. That’s my chosen option, now watch me fight! I’m serious, mind you. I’ve even stopped work to get this millstone sorted. And we’ll be living on basic rations until we do get it sorted because of it. Told you, serious.