While my mom was here a few weeks ago she kindly cleaned my house from top to bottom. Which was wonderful, and greatly needed. Sadly, it only took about two days for my spotless home to return to its natural state of disaster. Why does that always happen?  If I let the dishes pile up for one morning, forget to pick up Avelyn’s mound of toys littering the living room floor, don’t make the bed, and leave my straightener on the bathroom counter when I’m done with it, the house looks like a hurricane has whipped through it. A little negligence goes a long way. I was never an especially tidy person prior to having a child, so now with the added mess that her little being leaves behind, I find it next to impossible to keep up. I suppose if I were to spend all day long cooped inside scrubbing the floors while she napped, sneaking a few moments of tidying in while she was entertained by (heaven forbid) a Baby Einstein, things might be more under control. But even then they wouldn’t be perfect. And I guess I am an all or nothing kind of gal. If toiling all day long still won’t make the house gleam, then why bother? So instead I get out every morning and visit with some friends, take Avelyn for a walk, run some errands, and enjoy the day.
And sometimes one gets rewarded for such slacking! Tomorrow I will redeem my remaining two hours of maid service that I won a while back. Hurrah! And I will have no shame as the cleaning lady vacuums a week’s worth of sticky puffed wheat from under the high chair.
It’s just too hard for me to reach, OK?
What’s the dirtiest thing in your house?
24 Comments
I hear you Amanda. It is much more fun getting out with friends, and even working, than cleaning the house. Unfortunately for me I get really grumpy when my house is a mess. The dirtiest thing in my house has to be the bathroom in the basement. It is used infrequently, but frequently enough to need cleaning way more than it gets. I would be embarrased to have anyone use it.
Oh I wish I could just let it all go without freaking out. The mess makes me crabby and you know how the saying goes: If Mama is crabby…. Everyone has to go to their rooms.
The dirtiest spot in my house is the girls’ playroom. It is the farthest room in the house and I just choose to ignore it.
My biggest problem is this. I’ll clean the bathroom, kitchen and make the beds. Then I’ll go and tidy the livingroom. Meanwhile, Abby misses the toilet with her stream of pee, Jordan spills coffee all over the kitchen floor and neglects to put his dishes in the dishwasher and then Abby runs to the bed with a not-wiped bum and leave a poop mark on her sheets. So I begin again. And again. It’s never ending!
The dirtiest thing in the house right now is definitely the basement and the closets. Oh the closets. One day I’ll get around to those.
Funny you should ask, we just videoblogged about it…the poop tub http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jqO3_Gt2_0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fbetheboy%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F
DISHES!! oh, the dishes…the never-ending dishes! we don’t have a dishwasher, so it’s disasterous.
3 girls + 3 meals a day EACH + snacks = LOTS OF DISHES!
Invest in a hungry dog. Anything my little man drops gets instantly vacuumed up by our first “baby”. Sure, baby boy will probably pick up a nasty habit of feeding the puppy from the table, but there are worse things that can happen. :) And the puppy has never eaten so well… he’s become a carrot and cheerio addict.
I once heard a wise housewife say that children won’t remember a clean house; they will remember a Mom who was too busy cleaning.
You might find yourself addicted to this cleaning service. A clean house for a day sure goes a long way! (did not mean to rhyme!)
And, when my kids watched Baby Einstein (now little einsteins), you would be sure to find me reading a magazine instead of cleaning! :)
Right now the dirtiest thing is by far the kitchen floor. So dirty.
Ohhh – i just had a little break down about this yesterday. The sad thing is I have a weekly cleaning service, too. We were gone for 8 days to a cottage on Lake Huron and “missed” two weekends (got home on a Sunday night) so our usual mad-dash weekend de-clutter and clean was missed for TWO weeks in a row and in the first 5 days back all three of us got sick on different days so things just piled up.
Last night the build up got to me so bad I was in tears. We both WOH full time and by the time Maggie goes down we are pretty much in bed ourselves, after maybe an hour or so of time for us. Anything more then a little light housekeeping never happens outside of the weekend.
But faced with a trashed house, almost every dish dirty in the sink (no dishwasher) and a mountain of almost every stitch of clothing for all three of us (I can’t believe I’m admitting to how bad my house was) I was brought to tears.
The thing is I have to “clean for the cleaning lady” – she doesn’t really tidy (she has no reason to know where everything goes!), she vacuums, scrubs, dusts, etc. But one has to see the sink to scrub and the rugs to vacuum! So last night was a exhausted and frenzied house cleaning to get ready for her.
The thing about having a service is that we do keep the house cleaner in between her visits, knowing that she gets more done when the house is tidy and I’d rather pay her to CLEAN then to move my stuff around. Plus she comes on a Monday and the last thing I want to be doing on a Sunday night is straightening up for her visit!
our entire house is a mess. Especially now since we are packing and not worrying as much about the crap lying around. But on an everyday basis you will find:
Unmade bed
Clothes on the floor
Dishes on the counter (even though we have a dishwasher)
Dishes in the office
Papers all over the office (this ones not my fault)
Cat hair EVERYWHERE
Puppy pee stains leaking back up into the carpet
Hair dryer and straightener on the bathroom counter
You are not alone. I don’t even have kids.
Too funny!
The dirtiest thing in our home is not so much ‘dirty’ as it is simply disorganized and in SERIOUS need of love. Our Master bedroom, is terrible. We’ve got no organization up there and it’s so large that it’s reminiscent of a cave. I hate it. I’ll do anything to get out of cleaning it up.
As for the rest of the house, I have a schedule… A strict one at that, by which I get the whole house cleaned weekly. Each ‘zone’ of the home has a different day assigned to it. This way I’m not SOO overwhelmed when my days are crazy, but then also, I always feel like I’ve accomplished ‘something’. Laundry is done for DH & I on tues & thur. The kids are done, M,W,F.
Routines & Schedules are my life… But boy would I rather have a casual exsistence filled with playdates and errands… There are days that I would trade it for anything. :)
By far the dirtiest thing in our home is the bathrooms. All three of them really get neglected until they’re so dirty I want to hurl.
I’m not a good house cleaner either and an older friend of mine who has done the baby thing said that a timer was her solution. She would put the kids to bed and start in the room closest to the front door. She’d set the timer for 10 minutes and whenever it rang she had to go to the next room. Although it was just a few minutes a day it all got caught up in a bit and then she added one task per day while the kids were up. Like laundry on Monday, bathrooms on Tuesday. She would do a quick tidy on Saturdays if she was having company but generally left the weekends chore free so she could enjoy her time with her hubby. I’m trying to implement that. Not sure if you were even looking for what works for other people or not but I haven’t been on the computer in three days and I guess I have some pent up typing….
Always the bathroom!!! But the oven, stove & fridge get pretty disgusting too.
thanks for the post. I’ve really enjoyed seeing more of Avelyn! She’s super!
Sounds very familiar. I get in these phases where I want to keep everything clean and I will vacuum everyday, keep on top of the laundry situation, etc….BUT then I get frustrated that it is a never ending job. And the cycle of mess/clean up will never end. So I let everything get messy until it reaches a point where it’s too messy and I start cleaning again.
I like what Jill said above and will have to remind myself of it:
I once heard a wise housewife say that children won’t remember a clean house; they will remember a Mom who was too busy cleaning.
I love some of the other commenters ideas for scheduling cleaning – maybe we should try to get organized.
The dirtiest thing in my house is my son. Seriously. Two minutes after having a bath he’s filthy. The dirtiest part of our house is the playroom which doubles as the dining room. But I’ve decided that it doesn’t count in the clean house markings – so I try to keep the living room bearable and the kitchen hygenic and leave it at that. My bathroom is now very clean as D likes to put his hands in the toilet – can’t have him doing that unless it’s being scrubbed regularly.
The floors get dirty and cleaned every single day. I could clean it all day long and it would still look like a disaster no matter what I do. You just can’t hide cookie crumbs on smooth hardwood. The cleanest room? The baby’s room…because he never spends any time in there. I think it’s time to make it an office.
i don’t even have to tell you how sick my house is. You see it everyday:)
The dirtiest place in the house? Easy question, it has to be the kids bathroom! Mr. 17, Miss 13, and Miss 9 can not possibly even rinse toothpaste down the sink on their own. That would actually require effort, and who has time for that? Plus with 3 of them showering a day, sometimes the older two showering twice a day due to track, there is the smeary mirror from wiping it off with a towel because you forgot to turn the fan on. Oh, and Miss 13 hasn’t mastered the art of make-up application, so often there are little puffs of that laying on the counter tops. Overall, a disaster from the day I clean until the day I clean again.
Lest antone think,that because I cleaned Amanda’s house I must have my house in sterile order,let me set you straight.I am way more motivated to clean her house than my own-I don’t know why.I guess I like feeling like I am helping her out.In my own house?not so much.The dirtiest place in my house is the downstairs.My 22 year old son resides in this “suite”,and I don’t go down there too much.If I can’t see it,I figure I can leave it.That’s pretty much my attitude toward cleaning-if I can’t see it,I leave it,and if you see it,you’re looking too closely!I had a little(dust collecting)wall hanging that said,”My idea of cleaning is sweeping the room with a glance”.
Right now? Every single room :)
Everything. All of it. Dirty.
I love Will with everything I’ve got but damn if the apartment wasn’t filthy when I moved in. The sort that made the maids who I hired (to do a pre-clean befor I moved my stuff in) say “we’ve never seen anything this bad, and to do a proper cleaning, we have to be here all day.” I told them to leave the filthy stuff (cat puke crusted on the wood floor from his ex-GF’s cat) and I’d take care of it.
And let’s not talk about the cabinets – I’m shocked that people who ate here didn’t get e coli.
The place gets dusty – it’s old and we have a dog. But I try to give is a thorough scrubbing weekly. However, I don’t have kids, so it’s much easier to keep it clean(ish).
without a doubt…our floors. goes with the territory of owning a shedding dog. tuffs of black fur float like tumbleweed…i DREAD the day that Hudson starts crawling…he’s be a HUMAN SWIFFER…
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