Very insightful @Hoggirl !
Maybe instead of “stuff” you could make your house more homey by choosing items you want/need with more color or texture. Pillows with texture, a throw near the couch with color or texture, a soft small light or two. So maybe more from a décor/design frame of mind than “stuff”!
Noone cares about the state of H’s office at work (and I’ve seen it). I feel badly for the cleaning crew there. When I was working, my office space was always clean – one of the few places I actually had control over.
I’d say a good chunk of this is that he works and I can’t any more. There’s a fair piece of entitlement and passive-aggressiveness behind that. He was also left to fend for himself in a family that couldn’t pay bills and didn’t cook/clean/teach civilized behavior. Cleaning’s not that important to him (though clutter bothers him far more than dirt). He’s happy to live in ignorance about how to clean a counter or bathroom.
It’s long and complicated, and exacerbated by my inability to set boundaries.
Well, that issue is much more easily solved than the opposite!
Though DH inexplicably throws stuff into the sink rather than putting them into the dishwasher, he’s pretty neat over all.
D1 is like me.
D2 is the exact opposite. When I’m at her place, I have such an urge to get the broom out and sweep up all the crud that is against the perimeter of her kitchen cabinets. She knows it too. “No, Mom, you may NOT clean.”
I was talking with my daughter about this the other day.
Her boyfriend insists on a very clean kitchen. My daughter tries to keep the kitchen clean but some days, when she was working full time out of the house and taking graduate classes, she would have her dirty lunch dishes in the sink. He would come home and those dirty dishes would drive him nuts.
But he would leave his shoes in the middle of the room. And no one is very interested in cleaning the tub!
So she’s definitely trying to be cleaner but she was always clean. But they finally had a talk about expectations and how those dirty dishes and shoes in the middle of the room were the same. And everyone is trying their best!
Now my husband, as he says, he knows he can out wait me on cleaning the clutter! It’s been difficult with him being in the house all day, chained to his chair working! I leave the dining room/office alone! July 1 
it will be cleaned!
In college, the four of us paired up into the 2 bedrooms of suite (and later apartment) based on same levels of mess tolerance. It worked well.
I am “cluttered”, and my sister is “cleaned” with a very well kept house. However my mother long ago had an interesting comment, which once amused friends at a women’s retreat. It was something like this - “Your sister works so hard chasing the kids and the dogs and trying to keep the house nice… but it wears her our. You are blessed to have lower standards” . (Of course during those years we had a housecleaner come every other week, so twice a month things did for sure get decluttered in prep and then cleaned when housekeeper came.) It was interesting because my mother was very organized and clean herself.
Think about the threads on here where people have their housemates/kids “trained” via one method or another from throwing their things away to not letting them do stuff “until” or whatever.
Any time a clean person goes to someone’s place and that person/family opts to clean up for them to come, they are doing it to try to meet the “cleaner” person’s standards. I hear about it all the time from kids and teachers at school. H still talks about the standards he and his brother had to live up to at home to keep the peace with his mom. He’s thankful not to have to do it any longer.
I think we have to agree to disagree! And promise not to live with each other. 
Well… sometimes folks of different categories do live with each other (or … gasp… marry). But usually they find a way to work things out, pick their battles.
I would say Cleared and cleaned but most of the time it is cleared.
H and I come from polar opposite ends with his mom being extreme on the clean side and my dad being a Hoarder. Fortunately we both shifted to be more moderate. Neither of us like how extreme our parent was. I doubt our marriage would be able to continue if either one of us had inherited their genetics on what we “needed.”
Both my mom and his dad are in that more moderate range, so I guess we got those genes thankfully. His dad put up with his mom and just did the usual complaining. My mom divorced my dad, but hoarding wasn’t the only issue. (I lived with dad post divorce which is why I wrote that I came from that side.)
One of my friends has an adult child married to a person who is so clean and orderly that it’s required that the coffee cups be positioned a certain way on their open shelving, and all of the canned and boxed goods must be facing outward and organized by type, color, size. If things are not up to standards, the atmosphere must be tense, because my friend’s child seemed anxious when she visited them and didn’t put things back the way their spouse wanted. It seems to go beyond “clean and orderly”, but really more OCD. I wondered (but didn’t ask) what would happen if this adult child decided to just rebel and refuse to participate. The adult child is a tremendously accomplished, extremely well traveled and educated individual, sought after from companies all around the world. I’m surprised they put up with that. I hope that this strict need for order doesn’t go deeper than the kitchen cabinets or into more ominous needs to control.
I kind of worry about that one. Reminds me of that movie “Sleeping With The Enemy.”
I live a somewhat cluttered life, and have too much stuff. I think I’ve given up thinking I will ever be like hoggirl though. I have never been one to collect many things, but paper is my usual clutter. My husband likes nothing more than to come in and see clean counters and a clean kitchen table. But he has LOTS of stuff, and he may have a harder time getting rid of things than I do.
Something that is odd about me is that I love an uncluttered house, but my office cubicle at work? Completely cluttered. Lots of the stuff the kids bought/made me over the years gets brought here and put on display. My cubicle wall is covered with postcards and pictures of all our travels. My filing cabinets are covered in magnets from our travel places. These things make me smile and dream about where to go next! And my desk is covered with files, plans, etc. And all my bottles of lotion, hand sanitizer, etc. Everything is on my desk. I don’t know why it doesn’t bother me here. Maybe because I stare at the computer all day and don’t really see it?