Not-So-Good Housekeeping: Ramblings of a Crazy Woman

one particularly cluttered corner

"If you can't keep your room clean," my mother used to warn, "this is what your house is going to look like when you're an adult!" While I am quite certain my housekeeping skills have vastly improved since age ten (I haven't discovered a months old sandwich under my bed in nearly two decades), I'll admit this grim warning was not too far from the truth. Keeping a perpetually tidy house is simply not my strong suit.

I'm quite good at getting things clean. I have learned a number of tricks over the years for removing stains, getting into hard to reach spots, and the like. That's not my problem. It's efficiency and organization, really. You see, I have a very particular idea in my head of how things ought to be cleaned. It goes in this order:

(1) Picking up and organizing. You know, a place for everything and everything in its place.

(2) Cleaning surfaces. Counter tops are all wiped down, tables and chairs, and anything else that may have collected dirt and dust is freed of such offenders.

(3) Floors. Vacuuming rugs first, cause that can kick up bits of things and send them to the hard surfaces, undoing any sweeping that may have been done. Sweeping is next, and finally mopping.

Everything must be done in this order, because if, for example, the floors are cleaned first, the crumbs from the counter will dirty the floor and all that hard work is wasted! This was fine when I was working outside the house and didn't have a toddler. I spent most Sundays cleaning everything just like I describe above and we managed to sometimes keep things halfway respectable throughout the week. No problem.

Now, I have a toddler, and finding a chunk of time large enough to do all of the above at once is nearly impossible. Even if I do find the time, a good bit of my work is generally undone as I go along. It's just not reasonable to continue to try to do things in this way all the time, but old habits die hard, as they say. Until last night, my kitchen stools had been up on the table in anticipation of a good floor scrubbing for, I'm embarrassed to say, two weeks or so, because each time I got the dishes done and the counters cleaned and floor swept, something would come up before I could mop. It would have made a whole heck of a lot more sense to just mop one day, rather than waiting to fit it in to the proper sequence of events, but I simply couldn't bring myself to do it that way. I get almost nowhere with my cleaning during the day, because having a busy and risk-taking little lady means I have to work in five to ten minute intervals. I need a new system, and I need it badly. 

So that's it. No tidy end to this post. I'm off to clean a bit before bed, crossing my fingers that when I return, I'll be greeted with some tips from you tidy, organized people. This is my cry for help.