Welcome to Clean Freak Confessions, a celebration for sharing personal cleaning experiences and tips from leading bloggers. Join the conversation and share your thoughts with us!
I am outnumbered.
I am outnumbered when you look at the animal to adult ratio around our little New York City apartment, animal to bedroom ratio, animal to patience ratio.
Then if you throw the two girls along with the dog and the two cats and total up the number of ambulatory, mess-making creatures who do not yet clean up after themselves, the picture becomes clearer.
Fortunately, however, the children do not shed.
Yet.
The fact is, I had to go and fall in love with the kind of guy who would rather have a home full of pets than a home full of really pretty furniture with no claw marks on it. (Which, honestly, would have been my choice.) And so this past Christmas, I finally conceded and we rescued the pair of kitties. You know, for the kids. And for the dog. Who gets lonely. Or so I’m told.
It hasn’t been too bad so far – I mean, what’s one more water bowl to fill in the morning. But now that the warm weather is creeping up on us, I’m finding myself a little panicky about the quantities of pet hair I am already starting to spy around the place. This is our first spring with three animals and I don’t have 67 hours each day set aside for vacuuming. Worse yet, my girls are still squarely in the “pick a lollipop off the floor and eat it” phase.
(I know.)
When it was just the dog, cleaning was challenging enough; I wouldn’t be surprised if bulldog hair shares a good amount of genetic material with porcupine quills. The wool couch was starting to look like mohair and there weren’t enough lint rollers in all the world to make me okay with that.
Then I had an epiphany: New couch. Duh.
Amazingly, that took care of a whole lot of my cleaning headaches. Because as it turns out, when there are not six thousand little hairs jutting out from your sofa, the living room looks pretty darn good! If only it took me a little less time to realize that the same rule applies to coats, hats and throw pillows.
Since then I’ve learned the trick to keeping the house some semblance of clean is preparation: Buy furniture and accessories in pet-friendly materials. (Do you know there’s an entire furniture store that does this very thing?) Stick with prints and muddier colors that coordinate with your pets–if you’ve got a thing for long-haired white cats, a navy sofa is probably not your friend.
Then I make sure I have whatever cleaning supplies I need where I need them, when I need them. Which is pretty much everywhere.
I keep a hidden roll of paper towels in three different rooms, along with any cleaning fluid with the words MIRACLE, WONDER, or MAGIC in the name. I’ve got three different kinds of brooms and both upright and hand-held vacuums. I keep a decent stock of the least toxic air fresheners I can find.
And then there’s the double secret trick to keeping things looking shiny and new–
Guilt.
“Honey, remember those cats you made me get last Christmas? One of them just puked in the kitchen…”
Works beautifully.
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