Hotel--not hospital--corners on the bed every day!

I don't have a dishwasher, but I've never understood why I've never witnessed a single person, other than me (when I'm visiting houses with dishwashers), who loads from the back to the front - especially the top rack. Why would you load front to back? You have to reach over all the things in the front as it fills up and you can't tell at a glance how much room is left. Or is there some larger dishwasher knowledge I'm just not privy to?

I agree w/ the dishwasher loading thing - I had a roommate for years who would toss things in at random and I'd have to go in there and redo it.

Then of course, there's the proper way to load the refrigerator and put dishes & groceries away in the cabinets...
...don't even get me started on laundry.

I color-coordinate the clothes hanging in my closet according to ROY G. BIV. It's my most... closeted neurosis.

I arrange my clothes by category and color familybut I think that's just practical.
I make my bed EVERY day ( lamely, with a comforter)
I once got in a major fight with my then- b.f. over his poor dishwater loading, during which I believe I said "It's not just my opinion, there's a frikkin' diagram on the box!". Didn't go over so well.

I'm organized & tidy as I hate wasting time, I have too little to begin with. And having my place organized in an almost OCD way saves me time when I'm in a rush looking for something... that's my story and I'm sticking to it! :)

@ home body: I sometimes load front to back - it depends - if I have plates they go in the back, but bowls fit better in the front (I have an apt. sized dishwasher (Danby) that I absolutely love!), but certain things fit better in different areas of the dishwasher.

I clean the shower every day.. it's the cleanest place in the house!

I try to just let go, but I am secretly critical of the way my husband puts dishes in the dish drainer. They're jammed in and balanced precariously in such a way that fewer dishes fit, and they all dry more slowly. And then when you try to take some out, the others all crash into each other. Also, when another dish needs to be washed, he doesn't remove the dry ones. Rather, he'll just put the fresh dripping dish in with the others, so everything gets just a little bit wet again.

I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can be critical of the way he loads a dishwasher instead.

Folding laundry for me. Every single thing (except for pants, bedding and bath towels) get laid out -as flat as possible- in like piles before they get folded. Pants, bedding and towels get folded immediately. Napkins, kitchen towels and handkerchiefs get folded next. When my family and I go on vacation where we have to go to a laundromat, I have to literally stop myself from freaking out that my folks are doing it wrong. Both of my folks are OCD about different things, but they both think it's weird that I fold that way.

My friend has the classic quote after she got married and started living with her new husband and adjusting to his quirks. "I didn't know I had been loading the dishwasher wrong all these years." He gave her lessons on correctly loading the dishwasher much to her amusement.

After years with roommates, I'm pickiest about the fridge - I hate jumbled shelves with drinks, produce, leftovers, condiments all mixed together on all the shelves so that you can't find anything. Somehow new roommates have learned that the top shelf is drinks only, the drawers are produce/fruit/cheese/deli stuff only, egg cartons on the bottom, etc.

I used to have a roommate whose boyfriend would sometimes load our dishwasher to be "helpful." At first I didn't mind someone who appreciated a clean apartment, but then I started realizing he was putting the wine glasses in right-side-up, thus catching all of the dirty water once the dishwasher was done. I would have to flip them over and run them again each time... while slightly gagging.

I always wondered how he thought this made sense in his mind.

These made me laugh very hard because they're so me. I'm either very OCD about something or the completely opposite. I empty the fridge and organize it every day. I rearrange the dishwasher at least 3 times before starting it. Color coordinated makeup bags. Color coordinated closet.

Want to know what my room looks like? The clothing tornado hit.

I load the top rack back to front & get very aggravated when my roommate puts a glass in the front. Laziness.

When I put multiples away I always put the just cleaned in the back, bottom, etc. This goes for everything, glasses, dishes, cutlery, towels, underwear. This assures me that all multiples have even wear.

There's a book, probably out of print now, called "And I thought I was crazy!" which has chapter after chapter of individual's neurotic ways of doing things: sleeping, eating, handling money....

Everyone I've even handed the book to laughs hysterically until at some point they read one of their own and ask "What's so funny about that?"

Me...I'm a free spirit clutter lover, BUT I load my dishwasher from back to front, never let my silverware "nest" and make sure none of my cup handles will be rattling. AND my clothes are arranged ROY G BIV whether they're in the closet or in the drawers.

I load the dishwasher back to front, but I'm the only person I know who does it. Others may just be too lazy? At the office they put everything on the upper rack, even large bowls, while the lower rack is mostly empty. That's laziness too, they don't want to bend down.

At home, I asked my husband to just carry the dishes into the kitchen, I'll load the dishwasher. I always cringed when he did it himself because it was all wrong and I rearranged as soon as he left the room. Oh my ...

I'm in between how the dishwasher should be loaded, how the bed is made, and how the towels should be folded. I find it easily enough done - he just picks up and does some of the other chores.

I load the dishwasher back to front, as well. I tried to turn a roommate on to this method, but I doubt it stuck. I think yes, people are just lazy about it!

Since I am the main dish clean in our household, I totally agree that there is a certain way that dishes and cups need to be in the dishwasher to maximumize space. I always unload the bottom rack first and then the top (so the water on the top doesn't spill onto the bottom dishes) and my husband is still working on firguring this out.

My husband once complained and made a big deal about how I didn't clean the bathrooms correctly. I haven't cleaned a bathroom since but it does bug me that he doesn't remember to wipe down the soap dispenser or wipe off the toliet paper dust on the holder so I always adjust the bathrooms after he is done.

I always put the clean and dry washing up away while running water for the next lot (and yes, I know I should be drying it up as well....). My gf just washes the new stuff and sticks it all on top. Drives me mad as it all slides around and things get damaged. Gah.

Oh, the washing machine!! My housemate just throws things in like a mentalist and I always rearrange, and then worry she'll think I'm being rude! She also likes things to look symmetrical, whereas I prefer things to be grouped or assymetrical (I'm right on this one!) so she's forever 'straightening' cushions and rearranging candles.

I have to load the dishwasher. I've inherited my dad's tertis gene and sadly the boyfriend just can't fit as many dishes in there so they all still get washed. However, I really really don't like emptying it, I find it such a waste of a chore since I'm just going to reuse everything for cooking and eating, but I have to take the clean dishes out of the cabinets not out of the dishwasher. Go figure.

I try and not leave the any dishes in the sink overnight. This doesn't always happen, a cup or two gets left, but I try. We don't have a dishwasher.

I don't consider this a quirk, but in reaction to trish, I fold my (pairs of) socks. I assume it is different from just "rolling up" (lay pair together, fold in half, stick fingers in opening of one sock and invert it's top half so it's on the outside of both?) Although one of my friends was terribly impressed when she saw me do this, this same friend admitted to not knowing that turning up/down the heat on the stove didn't just change how quickly something cooked, but affected the consistency etc, so I didn't assume *not* folding socks was typical of americans just from her. (Although math problems in school along the lines of "A has n pairs of black socks and m pairs of white socks; he loses electricity; how many socks does he have to pull out to be sure he has a matching set" *did* make me suspicious....)

But srsly, do lots of ppl really not pre-pair their socks?

I've already sent this article to my partner and friends that have laughed at me for years concerning my dishwasher hangups (their word). I truly have learned to re-arrange the dishwasher so silently after being "helped out" that nobody notices. Just this weekend one friend stopped another from loading the dishwasher because she knew I would just have to do it over before running it.

My mother drys her stainless steel sink after every use and I am always amazed at how good it looks, I'm trying to train myself to do the same but obsessing over the dishwasher seems to take up most of my time...

In our dishwasher, the water sprays up from the center through an opening in the bottom rack. I think it's fairly obvious that if you cover that opening with a huge bowl, ONLY THAT BOWL will get clean. Apparently not, since I've explained it to my husband about 10 times, and he still acts all proud that he fit one last thing in the dishwasher. Gah.

I refuse to pair my husband's socks; it's my passive-aggressive way of saying, "If you have a problem with it, do your own darn laundry." In the summer, he has to change shirts midway (it's so humid here), so by the time I have folded the fortieth IDENTICAL black shirt, I'm about to lose my wits and might go postal if I had to match forty black socks as well.

Mine are always matched and folded once, in the middle, so the tops don't get stretched out by folding one top over the other sock. My pile of folded socks makes me smile because it looks like a miniature pile of very colorful towels.

We don't have a dishwasher, so everything goes on a countertop dish drainer. It kills me when my husband comes in to chat as I finish the last few dishes: the drainer is full, and I know *just* the right way to pile the larger pots and bowls so they won't fall over. But his eyes bug out at the gravity-defying feats and make me nervous. He just sits there, silently telegraphing, "There's NO WAY you can pull that off," and it gets me off my game, and things start to fall. If he says anything about it ("maybe you shouldn't do it like that"), it is off to the races!

(BTW, he cooks for hours and hours a day for us, so he's not a total lazy-bones.)

I'm not alone in the world!
I'm so like that! Somethings all tidy and others an organised mess.

About the dishwasher my boyfriend doesn't understand why I have a place for everything...

About folding socks I have to say that here in Portugal I just know another person who does it like me... my mother! In fact she taught me that folding is best not to ruin the elastic than the "sockball" that everyone else does!

Glad to meet more "organization freaks" like me! (in a good way)

@stuff143 I think we are soul mates.

I like my stuff where i leave it. So i know where to find it, when people move things like spices and rearrange my kitchen drawers it drives me crazy.

I'm OCD on a few things...

- closet is arranged in ONLY plastic hangers, not metal. Hate how those get all tangled. Clothing is then grouped by type and then by color.

- I "mop" our hardwoods on my hands and knees with a washrag and only hot water/vinegar. The floor mop never does a good enough job, IMO.

Also...I'm sure Trish1980 would make a very tidy roommate, but dang girl...I'd probably have to hide your body under some neatly rolled pillows somewhere. LOL!

Ha this will sound like going off on my husband but its really not. He just causes my household quirks to come out! Things he does that I'm always fixing/ begging him to stop:

-Loading the utensils handle up kills me.

- handwashing a pan or dish and putting it dripping wet back where it belongs.

-all laundry I do is sorted by color, whites get hot water, bleach, oxyclean, extra fabric softener and detergent. Same but warm water for the rest and no bleach. Him its whatever the default when you turn it on is and detergent.

-empty the vacuum before you start to vacuum everything (he's good for vacuuming something quick and putting it up like that) It just blows smelly old dust air around when you use it if not!

-my biggy for some reason: never never put my good knives or anything crystal in the dishwasher! Handwash my kitchen knives and crystal. I can't tell you how many times when we first got our good wedding wine glasses and things I'd open the dishwasher and on the bottom rack would be a few wine glasses crammed in next to dishes! Ack!

@Trish1980

Well, rolling sounds reasonable too, since I guess it's rolling the inside of the socks out, but I just call it folding because it's what I do with the rest of the laundry? What I'd thought you might be doing is shoving one sock inside the other, which I think some people also do. But I could be lying.

I have kind of stopped folding my underwear, though... I just lay them flat on top of each other. I have many pairs, so it's not like they're taking up much more room, and I think it's neat enough (and less time-consuming, of course).... >.>

I live in a small building with one shared washer and dryer in the laundry room. Most folks just use the laundrymat, so essentially I share with a couple who have a toddler so they do a lot of laundry. I never thought of myself as being particularly fussy about washing my clothes, but now I feel that seeing how strangely people can go about it, I must have absorbed more laundry training than I realized!

They SHOVE their clothes into the machine until it's jam-packed, despite our landlord's increasingly desperate signs everywhere about not overloading the machines. Honestly I don't see how the things can get clean, it's like Tetris in there.

They wash EVERYTHING in hot water.

They dry their stuff for, I kid you not, 4-5 hours every time. (This I'm acutely aware of because my bedroom is over the laundry room!)

They leave their washed clothes in the washer for DAYS on end sometimes, so the stuff often smells mildewy to me.

They never (truly, never) move their stuff out of the machines in a timely fashion, so every time I want to do laundry, I have to take their things out. We have one small table so often I have to take their half-wet, half-dry, mouldy clothes out of the washer, wash mine, put mine in my basket, put theirs back INTO the washer so I have the table to take their overcooked dry clothes out onto, so I can then dry my stuff!

& finally: I literally have seen a load of their laundry that included the husband's black dress slacks (aren't those usually a dry-clean item, guys?), his white converse sneakers, a bunch of cloth napkins, TWO bathmats/rugs, several of the little boy's stuffed animals, and a bunch of the wife's underthings. Um, yes, because ALL of those things should most definitely be laundered together!

They are lovely, kind people and it's a pleasure to see their little boy growing up next door. But I shake my head over their crazy laundry habits all the time!

This article cracks me up! I have a dishwasher, but I often wash dishes by hand and there is a definite order that must be adhered to! It makes me nervous when people don't wash them the right way and I WILL redo them if needed. LOL

Maybe I'm the strange one, but I want to gag when I see people hand wash their dishes by filling up the sink and letting the dishes soak for a while.

I flash back to my childhood, when my ADD mother would fill the sink with hot water and dishes only to forget about them. Hours later I would have to reach through a film of floating food scraps into the cold water to unplug the drain. The thought it of makes me shudder.

I rinse my dishes in hot water as soon as I'm done with them and stack them next to the sink. When I'm ready to wash a whole load, I scrub each individually.

I also find it impossible to do the dishes without cleaning the entire kitchen along with them. My boyfriend will just wash a rack-full and be done with it. I have to scour the house for wayward glasses, clean the counters and the stovetop, and scrub the sink every time I do dishes.

Which is why he does the dishes 70% of the time.

I can't think of a single thing I'm OCD about, but my bf is perfectly described in almost all of these posts. The dishwasher has to be loaded a certain way, the pantry is orgainazed by the type of food (not just canned goods and boxes, but breakfast, snack, dinner, etc.), and there is a specific way to vacuum the apartment. I do like things put away in their place, but I don't think I'd get upset if something was wrong.

OMG! I didn't realize that I was so OCD until I read through the comments. I have a lot of ways of doing things specifically, but I thought it was just something I did at random

I load the washer a certain way...pots along the periphery, silverware with handles down (a must!) When loading the top with glasses or small dishes/cups/bowls, I alternate glass/ceramic and plastic. For some reason, I think that the plastic dishes will protect/buffer the glass dishes from breaking as opposed to putting two ceramin/glassware items together

I fold the bath towels in a certain way..3-fold...I also do this with my underwear, categorize and color-coordinate my closet...also color coordinate my shoes and underwear

I must, must, must have the toilet paper roll with the tissue falling over, to see the pattern, not dropping under (I secretly used to switch the roll when at other people's houses until I once got reprimanded for doing so...I felt it was blasphemy to not have the pattern shown)

But I do agree with overture, if I do the dishes I have to clean the entire kitchen. This mostly comes from the fact that our faucet leaks water onto the counter behind the sink, so if I'm cleaning that up I might as well clean the rest of the counter. And if the counters are all clean, then the stove top also needs to be cleaned. And then the front of the cabinets, and the floor, and pretty soon I'm into the living room! And after thinking about it I do get OCD about cleaning sometimes. Like if maintenance people are coming to fix something. They CANNOT think that I let my house get even the slightest bit dirty. I'll clean like crazy the day I put in a work order. And then I'll do a once over the next day. I know they see the inside of almost every apartment, and I'm sure they don't care for a little messiness, but they just cannot know that I sometimes have sauce splatter on my stove or that my books aren't always perfectly stacked on the table! So I guess really I'm just OCD about people judging my apartment.

Are we really crazy/OCD??? Or doesn't it just make sense that if you put the dishes in the dishwasher, they be placed in such a way that they actually get clean? I mean. . .
This just makes sense to me. But my husband would agree that it is OCD. Cheers to all you re-arrangers!

I pronounce you all nutty.

Just kiddin'. I am nutty about a few things, although my house is never 100% clean. I would love to be nutty enough to actually keep things clean all the time. At one point in my life I kept a shiny sink and did "a load a day" of laundry a la Fly Lady, which sometimes still works.

I always load the dishwasher a certain way but if someone else wants to do the dishes they can be my guest. My clothes are also ROY G BIV in the closet, and I use only wooden hangers because I hate the way clothes get smashed together with plastic or wire hangers. My husband is always keeping the dry-cleaning hangers and putting his clothes back on those, which I find supremely annoying (plus they leave little hanger marks in shirt shoulders), but he has his own closet so I don't have to look at it that often.

I guess my golden rule is that I try to keep 1-3 rooms clean at all times. It's not always the same room(s) but if there's at least one room I can go into (even if it's just the bathroom) and feel like everything is in its place, I feel successful.

Did I mention I have a preschooler and a toddler? That's my only excuse. Pretty lame. I do make them clean up the playroom before bed, and also try to keep most toys in the playroom in the first place, which helps keep clutter at bay. Someday maybe I'll have more energy and will to stay on a good cleaning schedule...or more likely I'll pass the cleaning on to them like my mom did to me. No wonder our house was always clean when I was a kid.

Oh and I agree about the toilet paper hanging in the most efficient way...and also I spray down my shower every time I take one.

And when I use eggs, I always leave the remaining eggs in the carton in as symmetrical a pattern as possible. I guess that's not a household chore...just a quirk. :)

I am pretty strict with the "don't start another activity until you have finished cleaning up after the first activity" rule. Much of it has to do with the fact that I live in a 500 sq foot apt and if I did not clean up after each activity, I would be living in chaos.

I also must lay out my clothes the night before even if I have the next day off.

Hello Everyone!
sistervashti, I just noticed that you referred to one of my books, "And I Thought I Was Crazy! Quirks, Idiosyncrasies & Meshugaas". I'm so glad to hear that you enjoyed it!
The print edition of this book is out of print but the eBook edition is available and the print & eBook edition of the sequel, " Admit It, You're Crazy! Quirks, Idiosyncrasies & Irrational Behavior" are available (and you can look inside) on amazon, bn, Apple iBook, etc.
The books have loads of household chore quirks as well as many other quirks. Some of them are actually great ideas which I've tried out!

•Do you refuse to take the top newspaper on a stack (even if perfect)?
•Insist that the toilet paper hang "over"?
•Wait for the phone to ring at least twice before answering?
•Keep returning to the refrigerator hoping that something new to eat has materialized?

Admit It, You're Crazy! Quirks, Idiosyncrasies, and Irrational Behavior
and
And I Thought I Was Crazy! Quirks, Idiosyncrasies, and Meshugaas
by Judy Reiser

Outrageous, outlandish and downright ridiculous eccentricities exhibited (and confessed to) by otherwise normal people.
From hilarious bathroom behavior to funny money and unconventional clothing habits to eating and sleeping peculiarities to germ-a-phobia and more. Collected from real, live, actual human beings!

You will laugh while gaining insight into yourself and others!
People do the darndest things!

Info, reviews:
http://www.judyreiser.com

Thanks again!
Judy