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!
One of the most frustrating things about living with two dogs is the never-ending physical effort required to clean animal hair off of every horizontal surface in the house. Twice a year as our dogs shed their summer and winter coats we have to dedicate weeks of our lives to ridding our dark woods floors of tan and black hair, a seemingly useless task as once we’ve swept up a certain corner it will fill back up within minutes. After several seasons of this madness we finally invested in a special tool that removes animal hair by the fistfuls. In fact, during one grooming session we removed enough hair off of the older dog to stuff the cushions on a six-foot long couch.
The tool isn’t perfect, and the dogs still shed a tiny bit as they wander around the house, just enough that the act of cleaning it up is still pleasurable. Okay, a lot pleasurable. Many times I will post pictures of my dogs sitting on our hardwood floors and people will ask me how on earth I manage to maintain such clean floors. And the answer is, oh, I don’t know, one part vacuum cleaner, two parts mental illness, and a dollop of Photoshop if I’ve missed anything.
Of course, one of the best things about living with two dogs is how well they keep the kitchen floors clean, and as a family we’ve grown terribly lazy when it comes to wiping up spilled food or liquids. It’s taken our daughter a few years to accept the idea of sharing her breakfast cereal with the dogs, two animals whose existence she loathes, and I finally had to say, look, when you drop a Cheerio don’t worry about climbing down out of your chair and doing all the work it takes to clean up the mess. LET THE DOGS DO IT FOR YOU. She finally realized that there were advantages to living with such filthy creatures, meaning I might have her one step closer to understanding the joy of what it feels like to rid a floor of their winter coats.
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It’s been two weeks since my last Clean Freak Confession, but this one is a doozy.
If there’s anyone still scrolling down browsers through the text underneath my ugly mug, they’re probably wondering whether I have anything worthwhile left to confess. Yes, you enjoy cleaning, they say. We get it. Yes, you have the house clean for your wife when she gets home from work. Okay, you know how to fold a fitted sheet. What can you possibly confess now that won’t make me want to sew you into a burlap sack filled with snakes and toss you off a cliff?
The blogging gods have frowned upon me, sending shrieking harpies to accost me wherever I go. Stop showing off, fool! Don’t you know that self-deprecation is the clay from which all good blog posts are formed? The people want to feel schadenfreude, not guilt. No more posts about how clean you keep your living room!
My mother-in-law really likes that show on one of those lesser cable networks where the zany gaggle of homosexuals, southern belles, and sassy black women invade the home of a tribe of compulsive hoarders in middle America and insist they get rid of their collection of 1970s breweriana and the Nordic Trac that hasn’t been touched since 1993 (confession: I totally have a thing for Niecy Nash). Every time we go to my mother-in-law’s house, Niecy is up on her 42 inch plasma screen gently wagging her finger at some middle-aged schlub in Missouri explaining the need to let go of his beloved Flying V guitar that doesn’t even work anymore (and besides, he no longer has enough hair to be in a hair band). I realized recently that perhaps my mother-in-law is trying to give us a hint.
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Awhile back, Ree Drummond from The Pioneer Woman espoused the greatness of vinegar as a naturally and ridiculously cheap cleaning agent. You can’t beat a product that for under a dollar can clean your shower head and your coffee maker in a couple of sprays and a hard scrub.
But if you’re looking for another natural and fairly inexpensive natural cleaner, you should check out Grapefruit Seed Extract or GSE. I was introduced to it a few years ago by a friend whose son was always reacting to cleaners, and ever since then I’ve kept it under my kitchen sink and in a few spray bottles around the house.
I admit I was completely skeptical at first because, well, it seemed like a whole lot of nothing. But GSE has natural anti-bacterial properties, killing heavy duty viruses like Staph, Strep, even Salmonella on contact.
Like vinegar, you can use it to clean almost anything, and it’s pretty cheap. But unlike vinegar, it’s practically odorless, which is great for my super sensitive nose.
This concentrated liquid found in a tiny bottle at your local health or natural foods store for around $5 not only cleans out your insides (that’s right, you can ingest it), but it will do wonders at disinfecting your house as well.
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Today I have decided to conduct some science. Important science. Real-world, hands-on science. We are going to put the 30-second rule and its standard deviations (five second, 10 seconds, etc.) to the test, using my kitchen floors and some Cheerios and pieces of an overripe banana* as our test subjects.
TEST SUBJECT ONE, CASE DESIGNATE “CHEERIOFIELD”
Results after five seconds: No data. Eaten by dog by the count of four-Mississippi.
Results after 10 seconds: No data. Eaten by dog by the count of two-Mississippi.
(Initiated change in test environment and put the darn dog outside. God.)
Results after five seconds: Completely clean by naked-eye standards.
Results after 10 seconds: Same. Tastes mostly clean as well.
Results after 15 seconds: Same. This is not as thrilling as I anticipated.
Results after 20 seconds: Same. Am clearly a superior floor-sweeper, two degrees from godliness.
Results after 30 seconds: Please. Floors are clearly spotless, am planning to serve next dinner party on them. Which will be helpful, since I haven’t unloaded the dishwasher in like, four days.
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I remember when I used to fill out job applications how I would stop myself when I got to the part that asked about hobbies or personal interests. I knew they wanted me to list off admirable things like hiking! or watching old movies! or volunteering at the local food bank! And I would think, how weird are they going to think I am that I spend my free time on the weekends organizing my junk drawer?
There are few activities in life that can match the rush that organizing clutter brings me, and if you give me a junk drawer and an uninterrupted two hours I’ll show you a new way of living. Recently I saw a list of ideas for Mother’s Day gifts that included offering to help your mother clean out a drawer or closet, and I immediately showed this to my husband and said I DO NOT WANT THIS. I cannot imagine anything more horrible, someone trying to organize my clutter, not when I want all that happiness for myself!
One of the downsides of working from home is that I share my work space with my husband, one of the most unorganized humans on the planet, someone who has perfected the art of stacking crap so high that often his piles start on the floor and scrape the ceiling. And so I have to physically restrain myself from locking him out of the room and attacking his mess all at once. Twice a month I’ll remind him that he needs to take inventory, needs to sort the hundreds of stacks of paper that are preventing him from sitting in his chair, because otherwise I’m going to give in to my addiction and start organizing everything, and once that happens I’ll be so high from the adrenaline that he’ll have to rush me to the ER to make sure I haven’t overdosed.
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