This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All by Hanne Blank Boyd.
Click here for the full table of contents.
As we’ve seen, it isn’t always terribly helpful to use appearances as an index of whether or not your living space is whatever enough -- clean enough, organized enough, appropriate enough, whatever enough. So what is? How can you tell whether things are sufficiently managed and maintained?
These are important questions. The answers aren’t always obvious. The standards we get handed for measuring these things, like “does it look pretty?” and “would your mother approve?” are simultaneously arbitrary and not always relevant. After all, some people’s mothers would be delighted by almost anything and other people’s mothers would emphatically not. What people want, need, expect, and will accept from their living spaces varies.
Years ago when I was working as a housecleaner I had a client say “I want it to look like the queen could come to tea.” My client and I had to have a little conversation about exactly what that meant. What it turned out he meant was that he wanted everything to look as formal, strict, and prim as humanly possible, and I then had to point out that this wasn’t actually going to happen no matter how immaculately clean his apartment might be for the simple reason that his giant living room doubled as a photography studio and while about one-third of the room was used as a set and was completely empty, the rest was crammed with lights and reflectors and tripods and stands and cords and huge rolls of backdrop material. We eventually reached a compromise: his apartment/studio had to look like someplace where the queen could come to get a new headshot done.
Function, in other words, was part of the identity of that apartment and its appearance, and there was just no way around it despite what the apartment owner might’ve wanted. In truth, function is part of the identity of every living space, whether or not that function is distinctive enough or pervasive enough to be as visually distinctive a part of the space as all that photography equipment.
Walk into anyone’s living space, though, and you usually get at least some clue about their daily life, their preferences in terms of leisure activities, and how they like to eat just by looking. Is there a television and if so, where is it and how big is it? What about speakers, stereos, record players, video game consoles, and bookshelves? Do the bookshelves contain books? What kinds? Do they look like they’ve been read? Are there houseplants? What does the eating space look like? Many people’s houses include dining rooms that seem basically devoid of life, but their kitchen tables or breakfast nooks show obvious signs of regular use. Kitchens, too, tell us a lot about how they get used by how they’re organized, what objects are out on the counters (or not), and whether things look like they see regular wear. Home offices speak volumes too. Lord knows mine does. (Usually what it’s saying is you’re overextended and underpaid, and it is not wrong about that.)
