Day 6! DAY 6!!!
Every time I've ever gone on a longer vacation, I've always cleaned the house before we go. I don't like to come back to a dirty house so today was a Deep Clean, Top to Bottom Clean the House Day.
Suffice to say I hate cleaning the house. I was doing fine but ran out of gas after cleaning everything but the bathroom and the kitchen - the two rooms I hate to clean most of all.
For my 40th birthday, my husband agreed to let me hire a maid to clean the house before my parents showed up. When came home and looked around, I don't know what the hell she did all day, but I went around the house for two hours cleaning up after her. She did fold the ends of the toilet paper into those cute little points like they do at the better hotels. She left the oven light on (?) and it was apparent from the debris left on the floor that she vaccumed around the rugs rather than move the rugs and then vaccum. She also moved all the pillows around on the couch into some odd pyramid kind of thing.
My big thing for cleaning house lately has been vinegar and water. Really! Water with a bit of vinegar really cleans things super well. And no, it doesn't make the house smell like vinegar! I use it on the hardwood floors and then just use it anywhere I would've used a chemical cleaner like Lysol or something similar. It's a bit stinky while you're using it, but the smell goes away. Besides, if you smell it very strongly, you probably put too much in the water and you need to dilute it.
The animals make the house messy, too. We close the doors of the rooms we don't want their hair in but it somehow makes it in anyway. It drive me nutswhen I see cat and dog hair on the bathroom floor. I don't know why, but it does. We must bring it in ourselves when we go in and out of the room, opening and closing the door. I wonder how long the house will stay clean after the animals are all gone. But then I'm not sure if I can live in a house without an animal so I may never know!
So the house is clean. Mostly.