Cleaning House

…and this is a GOOD day.

I used to love to clean house.  I really did.  It was nice to get everything put back in its rightful spot, shine up the things that were supposed to be shiny, organize the clean laundry and put it away, and fill the house with the smell of freshly-scented disinfectants.  It brought me peace and made me feel like I had accomplished more in one morning than I had managed to accomplish the entire week before put together.   But now?  Not so much.  There are several things that I can think of that contribute to my recent lack of enthusiasm when it comes to cleaning. 

1.  I NEVER actually FINISH cleaning now.  I don’t ever really get that ‘sit down, relax, and enjoy the smell and sights’ sensation anymore.  My house is too big, for one thing.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t live in a mansion, by any means.  It’s just too big for me to clean all the things in one spurt.  And by the time I start Round 2, all of the things that were sparkly and cleaned during Round 1 have already been screwed up. 

2.  The Laundry Demands associated with 6 people is ridiculous.   I’m sort of a control freak about laundry.  If it wasn’t done correctly from start to finish then it almost wasn’t worth having been done in the first place.  If something is hanging in the closet all wop-sided and wrinkled, I’m certainly not going to iron the damn thing before it gets worn, so instead I will just re-deposit it in the laundry for another go-round.  (those were a lot of hyphenated words in one sentence.)  I have a system, is all I’m sayin’.  You can’t tell by the photo above (yes, I’m opening up a little and letting you into the secret world of the Zohrlaundry room) but there’s a method to my madness.  I do pretty good at keeping things under control, but when it comes to that laundry room, if I let things slide for just a moment, utter chaos ensues.  And the socks!  Oh my God, the socks.  I actually talk to the socks when I am trying to sort and fold them.  When I wash and dry and fold, all socks go into a bin in the corner.  Then, when a majority of the members of my household are OUT of socks, and have resorted to scrounging through the bin, then I will take the bin, sit down and try to sort and fold them.  This is when I speak to them.  I curse them when the matching sock hides, and make smart ass comments to them when I finally find them to assert my dominance over them.  It’s pretty crazy, now that I think about it, but it’s totally true.  Also, no matter how careful I am, I inevitably wash odd things with my laundry.  In the past year, I’ve ruined an entire load of dress clothes because I failed to locate a tube of hotpink 12 year old girl sparkly lipgloss; an ipod and a cell phone belonging to my eldest son; and most recently washed a load of “chocolate scented” clothes, the smell I noticed immediately but couldn’t quite place until I found the soggy chocolate tootsie-pop wrapper at the end of the load in the dryer.

 

3.  There are too many THINGS.  I am a very simple person.  There are very few things I require to get through a typical day.  Zohrhubby, on the other hand, if left to his own devices, would be a poster boy for the TLC show, Hoarders.   I am known for exaggerating, but I’m on this I am dead on.  The bigger our house is, the more room there is for ZH to stash shit.  It’s disgusting.

 

4.  I don’t really care anymore.   If I’m being honest (and that’s really the whole point of this blog, isn’t it?) then I have to admit that this one is probably the biggest.  I used to give a rat’s ass about the cleanliness of my house.  But the battle has been lost, I’m afraid.  I’ve resigned myself to live in a half-ass clean house for at least the next 10 years.  I’m tired of scrubbing little kids’ scribblings off of walls, cabinets, and floors.  And so I’m just going to leave them now.  And before I repaint EVERYTHING, I’ll take a picture for posterity.  

So, my point is, if you arrive at my house unannounced, it will be messy. If you call ahead of time, it may still be messy.  And I don’t even really care, either. 

 

If you care, then come over and clean it anytime you want.   And I’ll let the socks know you are coming.