Once upon a time…
I was a good housekeeper.
No, I take that back.
I was an immaculate housekeeper.
Every Saturday morning, I scrubbed our beautiful little bungalow in Texas. Brian cut our lawn then washed and vacuumed our cars. I cleaned baseboards weekly. I washed the insides of cupboards and Windexed the sinks until they shone. I hated to have a laundry basket that wasn’t empty.
If I came home from work and the house was a bit dirty, I’d clean it. End of story.
People would come over and I would scrub the house all over again before they got there. Having friends over would stress me out if the house wasn’t perfect. You ask these poor people if they ever saw my house dirty or messy; they didn’t. As a result, we didn’t have people over too terribly often. After all, it was hard to entertain properly in a dirty house, you understand.
When we sold our house, in the advertisement, the first words were: “This house is absolutely immaculate and like new.”
I was thrilled.
So this weekend, I realised that things have changed.
My little condo is not immaculate.
It’s actually downright dirty and grimy some days.
Do you have any idea how much laundry four people can generate?
Lots. (And yes, that is my laundry closet. You all thought I was kidding when I said we do our laundry in a single panel closet that Brian can’t fit into. I. Was. Not. Kidding.)
After all, I shoot for Picked Up. I’ll settle for Messy But Not Dirty. And sometimes we’re just Dirty.
There are fingerprints (and nose prints, if we’re being real here) on every window about 2 and a half feet up. There are tea party sets on my shelves and high chairs strapped to my kitchen chairs. There is food stuck in the carpet and a never-ending pile of laundry.
I run the vacuum around once in a while. I try to remember to wash the floors when I find that my feet are sticking to them a bit. I do manage to wash the washroom….every other week. I have toys stacked up in the bathtub corners. I don’t recall the last time my baseboards got a wash. And the insides of my cupboards? Let’s not go there.
I have friends over, look around think “Bah. They aren’t here to see the house. And if they are, this will give them something fun to talk about.” And then I pick up the dried Cheerios on the carpet while cursing the builder that didn’t give me a spot for a table in this place so we are forced to feed our toddler above a carpet. I open my doors, welcome them in and let their kids dump the toybox out in the hallway. We yak over a cuppa tea, they change their babies on my carpets, we have Veggie Tales dance parties. And then we pick up a bit and go to the playground.
I don’t stress out about the house much anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love a clean house. I still love to make it shine.
But now it’s not as much fun because approximately 2.46 seconds after I clean it, a tornado blows through, leaving Rice Krispies and socks and fingerprints behind. When it was just the two of us in our 1500 sq ft house, it was immaculate and easy to maintain. And now I live in 800 sq ft with four people and we have friends that come over, mail ladies that stop in after they drop their flyers off, babies rolling all over the floor and toddlers splashing in the bathtub hollering for more bubbles, dishwashers that need emptying, supper boiling over on the stove and toast crumbs from breakfast still on the countertops. We eat popcorn on the couch.
We are living in our house.
So maybe I don’t have sparkling floors. Maybe my tub is full of toys. Maybe there is dust on my shelves. Maybe there is dried nailpolish on the carpet and a stroller on my balcony.
But there is a lot of joy here.
