Average Jane Cleans House

If my mother were still alive, she would be horrified by this post. (Possibly by my blog in general.) I was always the kid blithely telling everyone at the school carnival that the cake she brought was from the grocery store, while she was constantly cautioning me not to talk about "private family business." 

Well here's some private family business: I'm a terrible housekeeper.

There was a time when I had someone come in every other week and clean my house. It was wonderful because I hate house cleaning, but it got to be awfully pricey and so when my longtime cleaning lady moved on to other work, I decided to see what I could do on my own.

It turns out that it's really tough to keep up with housework when you're almost never home. However, I had more free time than usual last weekend, so I decided I needed to tackle cleaning the bathrooms and floors.

Damn, that's a lot of work!

It took me almost all day and I didn't get to the basement or manage to tidy and dust the surfaces in my dressing room, but I accomplished my quarterly deep clean. That's right: quarterly. That's pretty much the schedule I've been on so far. Heh.

Here are some of the stats:

• Amount I would have paid to have the house cleaned twice a month for the last quarter: $420
• Different floor types that require different cleaners: 3
• Number of cats I made into the bed when I changed the sheets: 2
• Length of time it took before the dog peed on one of the clean floors: <12 hours
• Approximate number of kittens' worth of cat fur emptied from the ShopVac: 5

So yes, my house is disgusting until it isn't and then it gets disgusting again.

Where is my husband in all of this, you might reasonably ask? Why don't you not ask. That would be best. The last time we had that discussion, he was very proud that he cleaned the house once. ONCE! In the past 20 years that we've been together. So yeah. The work of the feminist movement is never done and all that.

But at least I have the satisfaction of a clean house that smells like Method squirt + mop floor cleaner (mmm, almond-y!). It won't be long before the cat hair tumbleweeds start forming in the corners again, but for now I feel I can take a little break. Perhaps until summer.