I'm feeling inordinately pleased with myself because I just washed the floor in the upstairs (i.e. "my") bathroom for the second time in three and a half weeks. My usual timetable for that is once every 4 months or so. In a good year. Oh, c'mon. It's *my* bathroom. Nobody pees on the floor in there. To be honest, I couldn't see that it really needed to be cleaned today, but Hoarders has me scared into thinking if I don't mend my ways, someday I'll end up in a house with two tons of poop and a couple or three flattened cat corpses.
But then I was thinking--maybe I shouldn't be inordinately pleased about that. Maybe "normal" people actually wash their bathroom floors every week. Twice a week? I seriously have no idea. My mother was what I have learned is termed a "crisis cleaner", at least in my formative years. She'd do the bare minimum necessary to keep the house from being a complete pit, then before every holiday, every party, every occasion for which the house had to look nice, she'd clean the living crap out of it. Fourteen hour long cleaning binges, fueled by black coffee, cigarettes, and Diet Coke, till everything sparkled and she was a raging bitch from resentment and exhaustion. I didn't learn any useful habits there.
Similarly, my whole adult life most of my close friends have been indifferent housekeepers at best. Maybe your cleaning-freak types could size me up at a glance and stayed away. (Though I must say, I think Whatever He Was to Me tended in that direction. Taking a shower with that man was an education. I have never seen anyone, before or since, soap up every millimeter of their skin so intensively and thoroughly. But since we never lived together, I didn't get any housekeeping tips. And he claimed he was a slob, though I never saw evidence of it. /digression)
So, I'm not being disingenuous when I say I really don't know what's normal. I'm thinking three times a year is probably far over towards the "disgusting" end of the scale, but cleaning stuff that doesn't seem dirty? I dunno. That one book I have about this stuff, which I've mocked in here before, seems to have been written by a woman with OCD-germaphobe problems, so I can't look at her advice as normal. I've tried reading stuff online but it still escapes me. I feel like this is stuff you're just supposed to know, but I don't know how other people know it or why I don't.
In the face of no firm evidence to the contrary, I'm just going to continue thinking twice in three and a half weeks is fabulous and keep patting myself on the back!
xoxo
3 comments:
Mom was a once-a-weeker, and I gave that up the second I left the house.
I'm definitely a crisis cleaner. If I could afford a biweekly cleaning service, I would totally get one.
We do crisis cleaning around here, too. My mother was the "white gloves inspection" type who usually cleaned about four times a week. Obviously, that lesson didn't take.
Post a Comment