That is NOT vacuuming!
I love my husband. I adore him. I do. He is the best spouse in the world. He buys me pre-emptive chocolate when he senses the arrival of my period, he tells me I’m beautiful, he gives a great orgasm. But he cannot vacuum for shit.
Our house is still on the market. (Want a quick way to add stress and lose your mind? Put your house up for sale.) Now that it’s been on the market for 6 weeks, some of the blush has come off the rose. We’re not in that constant state of readiness because 1) we have to live in the freaking house when its on the market and 2) nobody puts shit away any more.
When we get the call for a showing, it’s always the same thing. We have the 24 hours notice and then we have a 3-4 hour cleaning blitz, which, if we were selling a 1000 sq. foot condo, would render the place spotless, but in a 2.5 story century home with furnished attic and basement spaces? Ain’t enough time. And this week? Our living room was covered in set decoration and tools from our recent production of Peter Pan. The house cannot stay clean. Or at least not my level of clean
It comes down to this: I want the people who come to view the house not to think we’re white trash. Which means that I want to clean and dust everything. In a house so freaking huge, after getting home from work, I don’t have time to spend the remains of my day, ensuring that our dust bunnies haven’t morphed into dust rhinoceroses and that the baseboard dings have touch-up paint on them.
David is all about the cursory clean. The ‘First-Glance’ clean. “They’re not going to notice this stuff!” My problem is that on my way out of the house, I’ll notice that the kitchen tap hasn’t been polished or that the front hall runner has cat hair on it… again. I’ll dust and polish and David will do the vacuuming. But then, when I see where he’s vacuumed? It’s not vacuumed. There are still bits of things ON the carpet or the vacuuming marks suck. We have a shag carpet in our study – if you haven’t vacuumed the WHOLE carpet – it totally looks like you HAVEN’T VACUUMED THE WHOLE CARPET. The vacuuming marks don’t lie. And yes, I’m anal about vacuuming marks. You don’t just willy-nilly vacuum – you start at the farthest end and work your way back in little archways of recently-sucked clean. You leave a pattern. You’ve got to take out the attachment wand for the vacuum and suck off the bits of dirt that are beside the front hall runner. The cat hair on the occasional chairs needs to be gone.
David doesn’t see these things. And because I don’t want to nag, and I don’t want him NOT to volunteer to help, I do the surreptitious 2nd clean after he’s gone. My level of clean. It’s mostly working out.