House Cleaner

For three years I worked as a house cleaner for a friend of mine. (I even showed up dressed as a house elf once, much to everyone’s delight.) Once a week I would clean the floors, counters and bathrooms of their house, including the dusting. It was a four bedroom, 2.5 bath house. And I could get it done in 3 hours. I didn’t do the dishes, general straightening, or laundry. But that was still a lot. I often find myself reminding myself of that whenever I look at the house and get overwhelmed and start to think that it will take forever to clean it. Because I know it won’t.

I’m not a scrub-it-every-day type of person, but I do like things to be relatively clean. Although I’m looking at the random scraps of paper covering my desk right now and realizing I probably need to do something about it. I’ve really enjoyed my schedule the past year though because I’ve had at least the part of two days each week (this semester it’s two full days) where I’m home and Brett is at work and I can do some cleaning. And then when he gets home he always compliments me on it and tells me how good it looks and how hard I worked. That works out very well for me. But I don’t spend the entire day cleaning those days either.

When I’m cleaning I try to do the kitchens and bathrooms on the same days. They both require basically the same cleaning stuff. There are counters and sinks in both and the floors are solid and are cleaned the same way. Vacuuming and dusting I can do on another day. And then we do laundry on Saturday because otherwise it throws off Brett’s schedule. Dishes are done whenever we notice there are enough for a load, and they are most often done by Brett because I told him long ago that I hated doing the dishes and would clean everything else if he’d take care of those. And I love that he does.

And there it is. Our house that’s clean enough because people actually live here so it will never be perfectly clean and that’s just fine.

Now, since today is Tuesday, I should probably go clean the counters and sinks.