I hate cleaning

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I hate cleaning. HHHHAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTEEEEE it. It is my least favorite thing to do. I'd rather have a tooth drilled while getting a pelvic exam than clean my house. At least then, I'd be lying down.

When we had the condo (all 1200 square feet of it) we had a cleaning service that showed up every other week to scrub all the evidence of our sloth away. I loved cleaning day. I'd walk out of the house in the morning after putting a check under the soap dish in the kitchen and come home that night to a house that smelled so fresh and so clean. And I didn't have to do a thing. Well, I did scramble around the night before tidying up, but I don't call stacking all my paperwork into neat piles "cleaning."

Now that we are in a house that is roughly six times the size of our one-bed, one-bath condo, we are on our own. Until Tony and I are working again, we know that the luxury of a cleaning service is not one we can afford. And it makes me so sad. Today we woke up and realized that it had easily been a month since we'd last cleaned, and it showed. You can't have an acre of dark hardwood floors, a dog who sheds explosively and a husband who tracks in grass clippings ever time he walks in the door and have a house that looks neat more than two or three days, let alone a month. There was no escaping the fact that we were starting to live in our own private third-world country. I could build a new dog with the hair that was trapped under my dining room table alone.

So, after a solid breakfast of pancakes and homemade syrup (I was trying to dull the pain of cleaning), we set to work, scrubbing counter tops, dusting baseboards, sweeping the floor and mopping. Twenty-three hours later, we are finally done.

I guess the problem for me is that I don't enjoy any part of cleaning. I don't enjoy the sense of accomplishment, the sparkly way the house looks or the smell of the cleaning products. I don't like the way it makes my hands feel, or the roar of the vacuum cleaner or the way that the house is dirty again as soon as I let my pet moose, er, dog, back in the door. I know there are people out there who are really good at cleaning, who always have a clean house, who remember to not spray Pledge on the floor where they are going to walk in socks and who really derive a great sense of personal satisfaction from it. To them, I will always say, "Good job!" because it is not easy to clean consistently and keep up with it forever and ever and ever and ever.

For the rest of us, there are choices. You can live in squalor (my personal choice - if I had a dollar for every time my mother told me I might as well be living in a slum in Bangalore, I'd have enough money for a cleaning service now), you can live in semi-squalor (this is where Tony and I have landed), or you can gut it out and clean your house as often as you need to in order to keep it looking decent.

(Let me make a caveat that my kitchen is always clean. I do not allow my counter tops to get disgusting and Tony keeps up with the dishes, so we are really talking more about dust and pet hair on the floor than anything else here. My house is not a toxic waste dump. Just furry.)

All I know is that if you are planning to visit me in the near future, do it now, while the house is clean, or go on ahead and wait until early October, because we are not breaking out the mop again until Beau has made it look like we have wall-to-wall carpet up in this piece.