"...we wait until the mess reaches a critical mass..."

How many people and/or personalities live in this room?

our bedroom is a disaster. my gf and i are both secret bedroom slobs. the bed is never made. clothes are everywhere. bad bad bad. i think it makes sense for the bedroom to be the one messy room in a tidy home... it is the place that guests are least likely to see. and in our case, we enter the bedroom when we're exhausted, change into pjs and flop onto the bed. we wake up groggy with very little time to get ready and shoot out the door. so the mess accumulates until we spent some actual awake time in the room.

You call this room messy? I can still see the floor.

Fontessa, I wa thinking the same thing. LOL. Not only can you see the floor, but everything seems to be where it should be. Floor clean and able to find things when you need them = perfectly tidy for me. That said, as part of my recent purge of things I didn't need, I organized my bedroom so that, not only does everything have a place, everything is stored away in pretty boxes and containers. I take the extra 30 seconds to make the bed in the morning (I'm sure Martha's way takes longer, but 30 secs is good for me) and I try not to leave things laying on the floor. I've found it makes a big difference when I come home at the end of the day. Walking into a clean, tidy room with the bed made instantly relaxes me. Who knew?

Where's the poll choice: "All the rooms are messy"?

My Fiance's home office is....disgusting. I close the door when anyone comes within 10 feet of our place.

Ha-ha! This made me chuckle. I think with me, I keep one tidy room in an otherwise messy house! I try and keep the bedroom serene...

"A place for everything and everything in its place." That phrase is the reason our bedroom is always a mess. My husband and I share a teensy tiny closet, and don't have space in the room for a dresser or wardrobe. We don't have a ton of clothes. In fact, we recently downsized (again) to try and help with the closet issue. But with so little space, it's hard to find spots for everything. Clothing frequently ends up in folded piles (or messy piles) on the floor.

We hate our bedding, which is probably why we don't make the bed. It's ugly. I don't know why we haven't replaced it. Our bedroom is the ugliest room in the house, which is probably part of the reason we don't do much upkeep there.

To make matters worse, my bedroom - by necessity - doubles as my sewing room. And I have a serious lack of storage/shelving. So yeah....the bedroom door always stays closed. I'm so ashamed!

It's the bedroom for me too! Too many clothes and shoes, not enough storage, and, like closertotheocean, not spending enough time in there awake. New shelves soon should help with the storage though, and I do try and make the bed every day, which makes it so much nicer to get into come the evening.

Yes! my bedroom does suffer from the mess/clutter of too many clothes and not enough storage. I think part of the reason for bedrooms being more messy is that bedroom mess is not dirty mess. I mean, leaving stuff piled up in a kitchen or bathroom can lead to nastiness which is just not acceptable.
As I get older I am getting neater even in the bedroom. As for an unmade bed I think some of my non-bedmaking tendencies stemmed from having a mother with OCD. She used to make the bed with me still in it at times which while laughable now I hated it then. I think subconsciously I have been rebelling all these years by leaving my bed messy. Although, a made bed really makes a bedroom look really put together and I have been making it a new habit.

In both my current apartment and last apartment I had an extra room and that is my undoing. I turned the first one into an office and it became a place for papers to be piled in mountainous unfiled stacks and for all of the things that I didn't know where to put or wasn't in the mood to put away to live. In my new apartment it's a larger room that I decorated as a sitting/guest room but sadly it is looking much like the last one, the papers and junk are just on the couch and chairs instead of a desk. I only clean that room when we have company staying over.

I think the room pictured, if that is your actual bedroom, looks very cozy and of course "lived in." I would be much more relaxed and comfortable in a room like that than in some of the sterile-looking, designer rooms often featured on AT. Just my personal thoughts . . .

I dont get why it's a big deal. just unplug the lights, and stop looking at the mess.

My bedroom is almost always a disaster. My grandfather would call my grandmother's messy side of the bedroom her "irish corner", and my husband thinks that's hilarious and has applied it to my messy side of the bedroom, in the rest of the house clutter drives me nuts but I can blissful ignore it in the bedroom as long as I can't see it from a reclined position.

I think the bedroom is the one room where it's "acceptable" to leave kind of messy. As mentioned above, most guests won't see it and it takes way more effort to keep that place tidy. It's also why I haven't splurged on an expensive bedroom set and just furnished everything with IKEA stuff. Meh.

Growing up, my bedroom was always a mess - a total disaster of clothes piles, old dishes, etc. It drove my mother crazy. Then I went off to college, sharing a room w/ 2 others. The one roommate I hated went off on me one day, saying I was basically a slob and she was embarrassed to have people over. Something just clicked for me at that moment and out of a sheer need to prove her wrong I pretty much turned into a clean/neat freak. And stayed that way. For 20 years. Things can get a bit messy, but my tolerance point for letting them stay that way if very low.

The room above reminds me of my old habits - I actually shuddered a bit looking at it. The old dishes, the hot water kettle on the floor. Yikes!

I call mine "the basement."

Yeah, I need a "One tidy room, the rest messy" option as well. And that room looks clean compared to my bedroom. Clothes often times don't make it to the closet or dresser, and rare make it into the hamper. I have a little path through the heaps of crap on my floor. Actually, the only rooms in my condo I consider clean are the living room (where I entertain guests) and the guest bathroom... pretty much where ever other people see...

Since I spend a lot of time in my kitchen, that is the only really tidy room in my whole apartment....

After years of sharing a 1bdrm apartment with my fiance who worked from home, where the real bedroom was the office and the living room was our bedroom, living room, dining room, tv room; we vowed that there would be minimal technology in our next bedroom and that it would be the retreat and be beautiful. So, now in this new apt, every room has things put away before family and friends come over (everything does have its place...mostly) and the office is the only room that can never reach the point of being tidy, I think I might give up, there are better things to do with one's life-like create, read, cook, be with family and friends.

oh, lord yes!! my freak show of a study is the catch-all room. there is the biggest collection of junk, mishmash and ... well, that's where the litter boxes are. i am certain the cats plot my demise on a daily basis.

I am with Fontessa and Itblmr. You *can* see the floor, so by definition it isn't messy. It looks like a typical dorm room to me.

I'm with Benjy.

The home office serves as an office for my boyfriend* and as storage for everything else that has no room elsewhere...

Maybe it's why I always close the door when people come home and why I always work in the living room on my laptop...

* He feels like he has his own space and can be as messy as he wants in «his» office.

This room I do not consider messy. The bed looks made.

Definitely the bedroom. By the time I go in there, I'm tired, and I just step out of my clothes and leave them on the floor, or maybe sling them onto the chair.

I did end up with a messy room - and it was the bane of my existance.

I've cleared it out, repainted this past weekend and am now in the process of decorating as a cozy den.

<B>Secrets of neat freaks exposed:<B>
Almost all neat freaks have a secret catastrophic mess somewhere - either a closet, a less frequently used room, or a garage. Usually we will never admit it but it is almost always true!

Having an aunt who is a pack rat and a house that often times smells like dirt, plus an ex boyfriend whose apt was bordering on filthy, I will not let my home become messy or cluttered.

By no means am I an anal retentive neat freak. I am the only person living in my house so there is no reason for me not to keep my belongings in order and maintain a level of cleanliness.

I feel uncomfortable when I spend time in any notably messy rooms--and in a small 1-bedroom, that doesn't leave me much room for clutter. I occasionally stash junk in the bedroom if a visitor arrives unexpectedly, but in general, most rooms are fairly tidy. The closets, on the other hand--watch out!

In our last place, husband had an entire bedroom for his "office". I would just avert my eyes when I walked past it. I found that when it was painted a dark colour on the walls, the junk all blended and disappeared, like in a cave. When we painted the walls a lighter colour, it was a big mistake!

Now we've moved to a 1br and share an open office space in the dining room area. We actually had a real breakthrough with his pack-rat-syndrome. We put all his "stuff" into a storage locker while we were selling our old place, and he said he liked living in a clutter-free space and is now going to empty the storage locker and get rid of most of it.

The trial period of having everything instantly gone was a huge success!

I only have three rooms in a 350 sq. foot place that I share with my husband and work in. I can't afford to have one room a disaster area or I won't be able to walk from one room to another without tripping over something.

I think the only reasons why anyone has a messy place are that they have too much stuff or don't have an easy place to put whatever stuff they have. If you make it too hard to put things away, you will just leave them lying around.