A busy backhoe loader describes all the items it hauls off a lot and all the fun it has getting dirty while doing so.

Bear cares about keeping his house clean and tidy almost as much as he cares about his stuffed friend, Ursa, so he is determined to find the spider building messy webs there.

Mr. Messy gets a visit from Mr. Neat and Mr. Tidy, who set about cleaning up his house.

When Mama Llama says it is time to clean up, Llama ignores her since he is more interested in playing than cleaning, but Mama finds an imaginative way to teach Llama a lesson about cleanliness.

"A badger realizes that being too tidy could be disastrous"--

Fourth-grader Frankie Piccolini has a vivid imagination when it comes to cleaning his disastrously messy room, but eventually even he decides that it is just too dirty. Comic strip illustrations are interspersed throughout the text.

When Wendell doesn't clean up his room, a whole herd of pigs comes to live with him.

Pig the Pug loves to roll in all sorts of disgusting garbage, and track dirty paw prints all over the house; he does not like the idea of a bath, but when his plan the stop up the tub seriously backfires he decides that bath time must be endured--after all he can always find some more garbage to roll in.

A mud puddle repeatedly gets Jule Ann all dirty until she figures out a way to permanently get rid of it.

A little girl refuses to brush her hair, but when a team of mice takes up residence in her tangled locks, she faces a tough decision--to brush or not to brush.