Thursday, November 24, 2011

Cleaning When Guests Are On the Way

I was going to post this before Thanksgiving actually arrived but maybe is useful too for this pre-Christmas season. 

Emergency To Do List for when guests are arriving unexpectedly.  

In my case, I wasn't THAT short of time; my guests weren't literally on their way there.  I had Monday and Tuesday..  But I was still tired from being sick so long and we had other things going on, so I wanted to have enough margin to make sure I got to all the basics. 

It was the first time I'd actually really cleaned the house in about a month!  Yikes! But it is reasonably clean now.    It helped that I did keep up with laundry and kitchen clean-up during that month.   A little maintenance goes a long way. 

Also I've found that minimizing clutter helps immensely with clean-up.    A simplicity blog I read (wish I could remember which one) said that if you are facing disorder, think in terms of discarding something.  That has been really helpful to me.   If I face my disordered house I find that what is troubling to me in it is that there is something superfluous sitting there.  When I find out what it is and take care of it, the whole outlook is way better.   I really don't mind restoring order; the depressing part is feeling like there is junk there.. stuff that's not really necessary to have around.   So going straight to the heart of that takes care of a great burden.  What remains becomes more precious and more worthy to be treated carefully. 

Here are some more Quick Clean links:

What To Do When Your Mother in Law is Coming Over
Clean a House Quickly
Clean Your House in Under 20 Minutes

Another advantage to a quick clean is that it makes you feel more motivated to maintain the momentum and make some real progress on your home when your guests have gone home.   I intend to do some deeper cleaning during Advent since it seems like an appropriate time to do that "nesting" thing in preparation for the birth of Our Lord.    I suppose it would be better to start with that in October but I usually end up doing some or most of it in December since that is when I am digging into storage, decorating and so on anyway. 


Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving!  

2 comments:

  1. My mom used to tell me, "If you don't have time to clean, dim the lights." :-) I don't know whether that qualifies as sage advice, but I admit to having fallen back on it a few times. I once unscrewed most of the light bulbs in the bathroom, pretending they were blown out, so nobody could look too closely at my cursory cleaning. True story. :-P

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  2. LOL. My house doesn't have very good natural lighting, so most of the time it looks cleaner than it really should because everything is dim. : ) I might have to try that light bulb thing some time, though : )

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