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!
Last week, I confessed that I don’t really enjoy cleaning. I think some of that comes from the fact that I’m just not that good at cleaning. I don’t feel like I’m efficient enough, and I never feel like I get things done as well as someone else could.
There is one exception to this rule, though, and that’s with folding fitted sheets. For some reason, this task that gets most people in a tizzy actually calms me. Once I learned the trick to folding a fitted sheet, it became a task that I not only didn’t mind doing, but also seek out opportunities to practice it. Hmmm … maybe I am a clean freak after all!
I’m going to share my steps for folding a fitted sheet in hopes that you can accomplish something that may have frustrated you for ages. It’s a little hard to explain through just pictures and words, but I’ll do my best. Take some time, practice, and before you know it you’ll be folding fitted sheets with the best of ‘em!
I’m using a crib sheet so it’s easier to take pictures, but the steps apply to any size fitted sheet.
Step 1
Turn your fitted sheet inside out and put one pointer finger in each corner of one short end of the sheet.
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I went on about a 45-minute cleaning binge the other day. Then I lost interest.
But somewhere during the binge I came across a little treasure.
It was a pregnancy journal I kept religiously during my entire first pregnancy. I’d completely forgotten the journal even existed; I’ve had three more kids since then and have been…um…a little busy.
Needing an excuse to end my cleaning binge, I plopped down on the floor and flipped through the journal, marveling at the time I must have had on my hands that would have allowed me not only to record my daily weight, my weekly symptoms, and such details as when and how I told my husband I was knocked up, where I was when my baby first kicked, and many other trivial pieces of my pregnancy experience.
Needless to say, I didn’t keep pregnancy journals for my other three babies. I had bigger fish to fry.
Of all the pieces of information I found in my journal, there were two that stood out in my mind:
Seriously: this was hilarious.
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Note: this post is written by Wood, the wife and working mother of Sweet Juniper, not the guy with the hair helmet in the photo above]
I’m pretty sure I used to be the clean one. There was once a time when we only had one child and I was the one who stayed at home all day with her, and I remember sighing over wet towels abandoned on the bedroom floor, toothpaste stains around the sink, and sand that had spilled out of shoes all over the hardwood floors whenever they returned from the neighborhood playground. I remember thinking if only I could get him to clean up after himself, we would have a clean house.
There was one time when I went away to visit friends for a few days and left my hardworking attorney husband with the responsibility of picking the kid up at daycare and feeding her and putting her to bed. When I returned home I felt like Goldie Hawn “returning” to her family in the 1987 masterpiece Overboard. Our apartment was littered with discarded bottles, toys, pee-soaked-diapers, dirty clothes and baby socks. Wet towels covered the bathroom floor. I stepped on toys everywhere I went. There was loud rock music playing. The baby was crawling on the living room floor wearing nothing but a heavy diaper. She had food all over her face, cheerios stuck to her neck, and pennies and chunks of dirt stuck to her legs and knees. I will admit she looked like she was having a good time. I told him he was the first recipient of the annual Dean Profitt award in parenting, named in honor of Kurt Russell’s character from that movie.
And now, three years later, he’s the one who stays home and I’m pretty sure I’ve become part of the problem. Keeping the house neat and clean just seems less urgent when you have an office to go to (an office where invisible heroes come every night to vacuum and empty the trash). Home is my place to relax, make messes, and destroy the house during the mad dash to work every morning. I leave a wake of half-empty coffee cups, discarded clothing, and yes, wet towels. A messy house never bothers me because I don’t need to be productive or creative in this space: I just need to play and sleep there.
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So here is the ultimate Clean Freak Confession:
I’m not actually a clean freak.
I don’t enjoy being up to my elbows in soapy water, I don’t like scraping the goop off the stove burners, I don’t want to be on my hands and knees in the bathroom for pretty much any reason, let alone scouring the tub.
What I do enjoy however is having an apartment that I’m not ashamed of when a neighbor drops by with her kid for an impromptu playdate.
And so I clean.
Just as Kristen detailed some tricks to get her kids to clean up, (http://www.cleanfreakconfessions.com/?p=336) I’ve got my own trick to get me to clean up: Blasting music.
My sigOth does it with the headphones on, but me, I’m all about turning on and tuning in loud enough to be heard over the sound of running water (or me cursing the fact that I could be catching up on bad reality TV instead).
It has to be fun. It has to be upbeat. And ideally it’s something I know all the words to, meaning it’s got a 98% chance of being from before 1995.
In other words, this is not a list to impress you with my musical taste. This is music to get the job done. In no particular order:
1. The Go! Soundtrack: Fatboy Slim, No Doubt, and Len doing Steal My Sunshine; oddly, it’s equally suited to illegal raves and weekends with the mop.
2. Hits and the B-Sides, Prince: It’s hard to be mad at housework-or really, anything– with Prince on the radio.
3. Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette: Take it out on the pots and pans! Yeah, like that. You bad, bad, no-stick casserole.
4. London Calling, The Clash: If you can’t get crayon off the wall to Rudie Can’t Fail there is something wrong with you.
5. Songs To Learn and Sing, Echo and the Bunnymen: Yes, “Do It Clean” is on this album. No pun intended, I swear.
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Or, Why We Have Hardwood Floors
Our house was originally carpeted. I hated the carpet. I dislike carpet in general, really, but this was really old, really grody-looking carpet that looked like no one had vacuumed in the corners (or even come within six inches of the corners) in decades. We knew the carpet had to go.
We disagreed on whether carpet needed to go at some point in the future…or RIGHT NOW HOW ABOUT YESTERDAY. My husband wanted to replace the downstairs carpet with hardwood floors and maybe do the same on the stairs and upstairs hallway. He figured we could leave the carpet in the bedrooms…maybe just replace it with new carpet at some point. I wanted it all gone. ALL OF IT. Hardwoods everywhere. That carpet gave me a bad vibe. A bad, poltergeist, terrible-things-have-happened-to-this-carpet-that-cannot-ever-be-undone vibe.
The previous owners had a big shaggy dog, so maybe the vibe was more like “allergies” or “perma-wet-dog-smell,” but still. I was very passionate about getting rid of all the carpet in one fell swoop.
I also began to suspect that our small non-shaggy dog was suddenly having some…ahem. Housetraining issues. Backsliding, regressing, whatever. I blamed the carpet. My husband reminded me that the carpets had been cleaned right before we moved in and then bought a different brand of pet stain remover and assured me everything was fine. The dog would settle in! She’s only had an accident or two and he cleaned them REALLY WELL and she’d stop in a week or so.
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