I am by nature a slob. I am constantly stressed when people come over they will see how truly messy we are, and how little I actually do to keep the house clean.
About two years ago we considered selling our house and due to our work schedules knew we wouldn't be able to keep the house in the shape it needed to be to show it, we opted to get a maid. When the house didn't sell in the time we set, the first conversation was..can we keep the maid. In three short months we had realized the advantages of these people in our lives. We no longer had to take a 1/2 day, minimum, once a week to clean the house. We no longer had to juggle the kids between us to figure out who had to cleaned and who to take the kids out of the house. We didn't feel the guilt of the time we were missing with the kids when we were cleaning. We realized the time we spent not having to worry and spending on the things the weekend was for was worth the expense.
So what does clean mean to us? Two times a month a family owned service comes into our home and takes care of the basics. The basics for us are the bathrooms, floors, kitchen, vacuuming and other various cleaning. Additionally, if we have something we haven't gotten to that needs getting too, the refrigerator, we can pay a little extra to get that done also. They spend about 2 hours cleaning, and my house smells amazing when we get home after they have been there.
I am absolutely gleeful on maid days, giddy with the prospect of a clean house, a clean house I didn't have to clean. They make the kids beds, pretty much the only thing they so in their rooms, but the kids love it, stuffes cuddled on pillows and blankets neatly folded. Some how they get rid of that funk in Thing Twos room, it always smells like sweat socks and a gym (YUCK).
The thing is within hours of us arriving back home, the house is already beginning to fall back apart again. Someone eats a messy dinner, I drop dinner supplies on the floor, basically we slob the place back up. Having a maid doesn't preclude us from having to keep the house picked up, or vacuuming or wiping things down when they aren't here.
I have accepted a few things, my house smells like animal, kid stink and general people much faster than I want to admit after a maid visit; a scentsy can take care of this. My house will not always be clean when company comes, but my bathroom toilet will have been sparkling within the last 14 days, if even for a few minutes. There is nothing that will take that weird stain off my ceiling, both us and the maids have tried, it is now the hubs responsibility to paint over it. Laundry will pile up, things will get dirty, and the people in this house will occasionally live in a mess, an organized mess, but a mess.
As a person I see a lot of balls in the air I juggle daily; work tasks, house tasks, family tasks, wife stuff, friend stuff. We are constantly juggling all these things and I finally let the clean ball fall. I have decided of all the things I have to do, cleaning, deep cleaning like the maids do, is no longer something I want to spend my time on. If our financial situation changes, the cleaning may need to be picked yo again, but the kids are old enough to help now. For now though, I am going to accept the house is as clean as we can keep it and the maids can clean it, and be happy with the fact we can afford a maid and I can let this ball drop, love my maids and GO PLAY.
Update, we have been home in an amazingly clean house for 45 minutes, hubs isn't home yet..Thing One just spilt cornbread ALL over the floor, oh well.
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