Deep Clean Week 1: Unanticipated Depth

Last Sunday, I devised a plan. My kids are getting older, and the house maintains fairly well with our daily chores, but it doesn’t get good and scrubbed very often. I decided we’d pick one room per week, and make a list of deeper cleaning to be done in there. I wanted to start in the living room, but I got outvoted. The girls thought the kitchen was the best place to start. We took my list and went to work Monday afternoon after school was finished.

Things like:

Scrub all countertops

Wash curtains

Wash cabinets

Vacuum ceiling corners

Wash baseboard

You get the gist. It was a decent sized list, but we planned to whittle away at it for 30 minutes a day, all hands on deck. I figured seven people times 30 minutes a day is 21 man hours over the course of six days. We’d run out of jobs before we ran out of days.

But the paint. You know. The flat paint I talked about in my last post.

And so. Something had to be done. I was going crazy. Blaine agreed it was time to eliminate said flatness from our lives, and I went and bought new paint. Thursday and Friday, I painted. It’s a beautiful thing. Those curtains on that window? This morning that fabric was on a bolt at Hobby Lobby. It’s been a long day. I’m tired. But I’m done. I crossed the last thing off my cleaning list this afternoon… plus a few more things that didn’t start out on our list at the beginning of this week.

Liberty told me tonight that she found the spot we missed in the kitchen: under the stove top. It’s waiting until we rotate back to the kitchen again.

Next week the living room is up. I don’t anticipate paint being needed in any form.

(For the record, because no one was in the kitchen with me when I took these photos and the old mirror in the last photo boasts a face that sent me back to the camera… it’s a paper towel roll in a round metal holder. That looks like a face, apparently. Or maybe I’m just really tired.)