#HTE

“Unf*ck Your Habitat:” The F-Bomb-Laden Approach to Cleaning House

It’s always eye-opening to see how real people live, in contrast to the clutter-free staging of a design magazine apartment spread. It’s also interesting to see that before-and-after photos of someone’s home being cleaned…don’t always look very different.

Unfuck Your Habitat is a Tumblr started by Rachel Hoffman, whose no-nonsense, piecemeal approach to cleaning house is refreshingly honest. If Japanese decluttering expert Marie Kondo is a General laying out long-term strategy, Hoffman is Special Forces, getting in-and-out to pull small, quiet, quick-‘n-dirty jobs as needed. To that end, her Tumblr features submitted photos of folks’ before-and-afters of minor cleaning jobs in the service of, well, unfucking things.

Hoffman’s central tenet is that most of us are simply too busy to clean house. “Our lives are complicated and sometimes messy, and we’re often distracted and overwhelmed and lazy,” she writes. But the larger idea is that if we do a little at a time, using methods like her 20/10s—that’s 20 minutes of cleaning, 10 minutes of fucking off—we can at least start to make a dent.

The important thing to remember is that there is nothing that can’t be unfucked. You just have to do it. You just have to overcome the compulsion to sit on the couch, on the computer, watching TV, and get up and do SOMETHING. Anything.

Hoffman’s cluttering-attacking philosophies, which are loaded up with more “fucks” than a Bill Burr set, has landed her a book deal; “Unf*ck Your Habitat: You’re Better Than Your Mess” just came out this week. Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing has a review of it here.

http://www.core77.com/posts/59409/Unfck-Your-Habitat-The-F-Bomb-Laden-Approach-to-Cleaning-House