I clean house once every five years. No lie...and if it bothers you, feel free to head down to my sister's where, even without prior notice, you can eat off the floor. (WHY?)
It has always been my position...house cleaning is not in my job description. My total lack of such is 99% of the reason The Big Boy married me...his mother is a neat/control/management freak and growing up in that house scarred those kids for LIFE. The standing joke in their family is that he spent 30 years looking for his mother's exact opposite and then...married her.
There's a lot to be said for spontaneous ;)
For real...I throw parties where dirt, sticks and crawly things are the primary theme. A friend of mine wrote a book wherein I got mentioned...concerning a major transition period in his life where he realized that the trunk of HIS car has an emergency kit and a spare tire, and the trunk of MY car has...a party. I have a picnic basket, a small grill, chairs and a blanket. I can pull over and entertain in a ditch ;) You wouldn't want to do it for a living but it breaks up the monotony sometimes.
ANYWAY. I am in the midst of a periodic housecleaning spree. It took me THREE DAYS to clean the kitchen, and the floor involved a brillo pad, a bee-keeping tool, a Hoover floor cleaner and a gallon of Clorox. I didn't get the cabinets re-organized, but by george the germs have vacated for the time being.
Day before yesterday, I started on the long-abandoned Big Den (not to be confused with the Little Den, which is where we had all migrated to, out of necessity.) I'm on my second jug of Home Defense bug killer, which is necessary to fight off the waves of spiders who realized about three months ago that we were running an assisted living facility for arachnids in there. I swept and brushed and hauled and moved and vacuumed and wiped and cleaned and piled. I filled one large trash bag with TNK's clothes, another with TNNK's clothes, one with shoes, one (and a dog food bag) with trash and one bag with mine and TBB's clothes. (PILFERED, I might add, from our closets by TNK, putting together outfits.)
Flipped cushions and vacuumed furniture and scraped old gum and repainted a tabletop and peeled all the candle wax off the tabletops. All this and I got about...halfway done. I still have the dining room to finish, but it's small and all that's there is a table covered with half-empty wine bottles and seldom used appliances that don't have a customary home. In the grand scheme of things, those will all go onto shelves in the garage. When I get the garage cleaned out.
Long about six o'clock, I gave out. Catch in my hip and crick in my neck and I was TIRED. So I poured a drink, opened some cans of beans and potatoes for dinner and parked my weary ass on the couch. Felt the love ooze all through me. Almost done...bourbon on ice and an almost clean house. Life is good.
The door opened. The Big Boy walked in. Put his bag on a chair, stepped into the Big Den and commented, "Oh! You moved the couch," and moved on to the kitchen.
Uh, yeah. I did. Thanks for noticing. When I bash his brains in? I may BURY him in that couch. It's clean and the spiders aren't there any more.
It has always been my position...house cleaning is not in my job description. My total lack of such is 99% of the reason The Big Boy married me...his mother is a neat/control/management freak and growing up in that house scarred those kids for LIFE. The standing joke in their family is that he spent 30 years looking for his mother's exact opposite and then...married her.
There's a lot to be said for spontaneous ;)
For real...I throw parties where dirt, sticks and crawly things are the primary theme. A friend of mine wrote a book wherein I got mentioned...concerning a major transition period in his life where he realized that the trunk of HIS car has an emergency kit and a spare tire, and the trunk of MY car has...a party. I have a picnic basket, a small grill, chairs and a blanket. I can pull over and entertain in a ditch ;) You wouldn't want to do it for a living but it breaks up the monotony sometimes.
ANYWAY. I am in the midst of a periodic housecleaning spree. It took me THREE DAYS to clean the kitchen, and the floor involved a brillo pad, a bee-keeping tool, a Hoover floor cleaner and a gallon of Clorox. I didn't get the cabinets re-organized, but by george the germs have vacated for the time being.
Day before yesterday, I started on the long-abandoned Big Den (not to be confused with the Little Den, which is where we had all migrated to, out of necessity.) I'm on my second jug of Home Defense bug killer, which is necessary to fight off the waves of spiders who realized about three months ago that we were running an assisted living facility for arachnids in there. I swept and brushed and hauled and moved and vacuumed and wiped and cleaned and piled. I filled one large trash bag with TNK's clothes, another with TNNK's clothes, one with shoes, one (and a dog food bag) with trash and one bag with mine and TBB's clothes. (PILFERED, I might add, from our closets by TNK, putting together outfits.)
Flipped cushions and vacuumed furniture and scraped old gum and repainted a tabletop and peeled all the candle wax off the tabletops. All this and I got about...halfway done. I still have the dining room to finish, but it's small and all that's there is a table covered with half-empty wine bottles and seldom used appliances that don't have a customary home. In the grand scheme of things, those will all go onto shelves in the garage. When I get the garage cleaned out.
Long about six o'clock, I gave out. Catch in my hip and crick in my neck and I was TIRED. So I poured a drink, opened some cans of beans and potatoes for dinner and parked my weary ass on the couch. Felt the love ooze all through me. Almost done...bourbon on ice and an almost clean house. Life is good.
The door opened. The Big Boy walked in. Put his bag on a chair, stepped into the Big Den and commented, "Oh! You moved the couch," and moved on to the kitchen.
Uh, yeah. I did. Thanks for noticing. When I bash his brains in? I may BURY him in that couch. It's clean and the spiders aren't there any more.
Comments
It is a little weird but I actually don't mind doing housework. I am a guy. I do not like clutter and chaos.
I just do a few things a day. Today was laundry, cleaning the patio, odds and ends. I like it. My wife like it too.