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I hate carpet. My goal before I die is to rid my house of any and all carpet.
Carpet and I do not get along. I much prefer hard surfaces. Hard surfaces are much more forgiving.
But I do have carpeting in a couple of remaining areas of my house, and until my kids are out of the destructo-staino stage, I’m just going to hold tight before making any large decisions on new flooring.
For those of you with carpet, I’m sure you have your own little arsenal of cleaning tricks.
I thought I’d share a few of mine. Feel free to jump in and offer up any of your own!
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My wife calls from work to tell me about an e-mail from those looking out for my best interests that I had a post way overdue for Clean Freak Confessions. Oops! I think, listening carefully to determine whether or not my napping son is still asleep. I look over at my laptop, then stare at a kitchen full of dishes dirtied by an unnecessarily elaborate picnic lunch I’d made for the kids. . .
Once the kitchen counters are sparkling and the sink is emptied of dishes, I stare at my laptop again and notice all the dog hair on the rug. Ah, the sound of the vacuum. It’s wonderful for drowning out the nagging voice of responsibility.
Once my wife returns from work and gives me a little time alone with the laptop, I sit in the lounge chair and just stare at the screen. What more is there to say? How much more mom porn can I write? Yes, I love cleaning. Even I am annoyed at myself by now. Even revealing how messy our basement is doesn’t seem to make me any less annoying. I scratch behind my beloved German Shorthaired Pointer’s ear. What’s this? A strange bump! Upon closer inspection, I find a tick swollen with blood, twitching its disgusting little legs. It is nearly the size of a fingernail. I weigh my options: I could keep trying to write a post for Clean Freak Confessions, or I could go into full-on tick battle mode.
Like it’s really even a choice! I think, rolling up my sleeves.
The smell of burning dog hair fills the air; my fingers strike matchstick after matchstick; the dog twitches in reflexive fear. Soon half a dozen tick corpses litter the floor. I have to make sure that I’ve gotten all the ticks, so I investigate every inch of my dog’s scalp (including an awkward foray into his nether regions that I’d rather not think about ever again). Now there are scattered clumps of dog hair on the floor, so out comes the vacuum again. The thought of all those dead ticks on the floor is really bothering even after I’ve vacuumed them up so I check again to make sure they’re really all gone and then I mop where they were just in case there’s any tick juice I can’t see. Then I take the dog outside to hose him down and apply a few fistfuls of anti-flea and tick shampoo. Leaving him dripping and staring mournfully at me as I rush inside to check the kids for ticks. Thankfully there are none, but I ponder giving them a bath with J&J’s No More Ticks shampoo anyway.
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I’m hoping this is universal.
I searched my soul for the answer to the question, “What spot in your house would you be most horrified for your mother-in-law to see?” And after considering:
a) My pantry drawer
b) My closet (it’s better now! I organized it!)
c) Under my sofa cushions, for Pete’s sake (next time I buy new sofas, I’m getting the kind with no removable cushions)
d) My produce drawers (rot, rot, rot)
I settled on:
e) The cabinet space under my kitchen and bathroom sinks.
Why is that area such a dank, unclean place? I know it has something to do with the humidity. Water moves through pipes, the pipes might occasionally burst a vessel and drip a bit, there are cleaning (or bath) products under there. Yuck!
All the talk about folding fitted sheets that’s been going on around here has me a little ashamed. Ashamed and in need of…DRAMATIC EYEBALL ROLLING GESTURE UP TO THE NAME OF THIS WEBSITE…confession. Although I think we were supposed to confess things about how clean and neat we are and how we love being clean and neat but you know what? I’ve been at this for eight weeks now. I am down to the shameful dirty confessions. It’s all I’ve got left.
This is a picture of my linen closet:
Yeah. Those fitted sheets are not folded properly. I don’t even think the flat sheets are what you would consider “folded properly.” I don’t know where the pillowcases are (though if I had to guess I’d say they were bunched up in the corners of the fitted sheets), I don’t remember ever owning blue sheets, I’ve been looking for that striped rug for awhile now and I do know that we own at least five sets of identical-looking brown sheets in full, queen AND king sizes, just to make mucho-ultra-confusing.
And now all this talk of sheets brings me to another…confession? tangent? something?…about sheets. I once heard that the “proper” way to make the bed involves putting the flat sheet on upside down – so any pattern or stitching or aesthetic detail faces the mattress. This wigged me out to no end. Why? WHY?
Someone told me it was so you could “see” the design when you get in and pull the sheets up. This made even less sense to me, since who pulls the sheets up over their face to contemplate the delicate floral design of the bedding? Then someone told me it was so the sheets would look right if you folded them down a little, a la hotel turndown service. But…I don’t HAVE hotel turndown service in my house. I just…get in bed. Sometimes I kick the top covers off and then what? I WILL SEE THE UPSIDE-DOWN SHEET AND IT WILL EAT ME IN MY NIGHTMARES.
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My husband and I spent several hours this morning dismantling our basement so that a crew of carpet installers could come in and tear apart the floors. This last, most insane project is the result of my overwhelming, almost blinding nesting instinct, and is not something I would recommend to anyone, let alone someone who is going to give birth in less than four weeks. It’s almost as stressful as moving to an entirely new house, except without the judgmental glares from new neighbors who are trying to assess whether or not you’re the type of family who parks their car on cinderblocks in the front yard.
We needed new carpet for a couple of reasons, the main one being aesthetics. We also haven’t had the carpets cleaned since moving into this house, and since the previous owners had a cat my husband has been spending almost every second of his life cursing his overactive allergies. Removing this carpet should save him a couple thousand sneezes per day, at the minimum, and I’m betting that before the last inch of it is laid into the corners of our bedroom he will turn to me and declare dramatically that his allergies are cured. Because he’s cute like that.
The worst part of this hasn’t been watching him move all the furniture out onto the patio in the backyard but seeing the stains on the underside of the carpet as it is dragged into the driveway. Yuck! The size and colors of those stains! When the old carpet came upstairs from the room that will be the new baby’s nursery, I saw a stain that was most likely a result of my cousin George’s fateful summer in that room. It looked like he spilled at least a keg of Miller Lite or murdered a friend and covered up the evidence.
The new carpet needs a steam cleaner, which we’ll be looking at in a few months, after we’ve moved all the crap from our basement back in and settled back into the rooms. Oh yeah, and AFTER I HAVE PUSHED A BABY OUT.
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