Would you rather be in an extremely messy house or an extremely cluttered house?

I am a messy person. Everything I do makes a mess. I am not great at cleaning it up. There are always dishes in the sink, papers scattered everywhere—laundry and shoes in random locations—you name it. We don’t have visitors often because our house is too messy for guests.

We have some friends who aren’t messy—what little space they have, they will keep clean, but their house is incredibly cluttered—like there are huge boxes of things everywhere and they have paths and trails everywhere to get from point A to point B in the house. If you want to sit somewhere, they have to move piles of stuff so you have a seat.

In my opinion, messy is a lousy situation, but it’s better than being cluttered. It’s easy to clean up when I want to or need to. While my husband and I are messy, we don’t have much stuff and we don’t mind throwing everything away. But in my cluttered friend’s opinion, cluttered is better because the main areas—kitchen and bathroom are mostly always clean and spotless and the boxes and stacks might get dusty, but they are in tidy rows.

I know most people wouldn’t want to be in either situation, but I was just wondering—which house would you rather be in? The messy one, or the cluttered one?