It’s not that our house is particularly messy–
But who am I kidding?
Our house is pretty messy.
What I’m trying to say is that we don’t live in squalor.
Almost every day, we eat homemade meals prepared and served on clean dishes. Every morning, we pull clean clothes from our closets and dresser drawers. Every night, we pull down the covers on a made bed and slip between sheets that haven’t been slept on for more than a week.
But our home bears the impact of daily living, and neither Daniel nor I are the neatest people in the world.
We have stacks of books and magazines on our nightstands, stacks of mail and packaging stacked on our table, and stacks of dirty dishes next to our sink. The living room couches are strewn with unfolded blankets, the floor beneath them strewn with shoes left behind where I took them off after I got home from work, the table beside them strewn with used mugs from the tea I drank with my books in the evenings.
And because there are piles of stuff all over the surfaces and floors, surfaces are rarely dusted and floors rarely swept. Which means our house is a mess.
While I have grandiose dreams of a household system to keep the house always spotless, our actual housecleaning system goes like this:
1) Invite someone over for dinner
2) Spend the day before eliminating piles and cleaning underneath them
3) Have people over for dinner
4) Let the dishes from having people over start the next pile of uncleanliness, which continues to grow until…
5) We invite someone over for dinner again
That’s not to say that I’m not working on establishing habits to control the clutter and uncleanliness. But we are also trying to make a habit of inviting people over more often–at least in part so we can keep the house clean.
That is our PRIME motivator in keeping our house clean!