Spring cleaning

I like the idea of spring cleaning--get the house aired and freshened after the staleness of winter, but the reality of it is not so pleasant, especially with kids running amok. Various pregnancies and newborns and lack of inspiration have prevented me from ever doing real spring cleaning in the whole four years that we've lived in our house. I wasn't even planning on spring cleaning this spring, but it happened anyways. It all started a few weeks ago when I randomly cleaned out the craft/sewing closet. That got my cleaning juices flowing. If we have creative juices, we have cleaning juices too, right? Ok, ew, now I'm picturing blue Windex dripping down my forehead like sweat.

In the past few weeks since the epic craft closet purge, I have: vacuumed out the van, cleaned the bathrooms (that really should happen more regularly than it does and should not be of note...but it is), scrubbed out and bleached the shower, swept the kitchen, scrubbed the kitchen floor Cinderella-style, vacuumed the carpets, and washed the carpets with our Hoover carpet washer. For someone (me) who likes to have a plan, all of this cleaning happened rather sporadically and intermittently. I think it happened mostly because I have been putting it off too long and things were getting desperate. This is the longest we've ever lived anywhere by 3 years, so all of our many moves previously have kind of forced us to do major cleaning. I was cornered by a much dirtier house than I've ever had before. That is so not me! It was time. Spring break was the perfect time for deep cleaning--Jeff was home to help me move furniture.

One of the reasons that I don't mop regularly is because it totally stresses me out to feed people in the kitchen after I've put in the substantial effort to clean the floors. All of that hard work just feels so futile once that first blob of banana mush squelches onto the floor. Our kitchen is on the spacious side, so it takes a significant effort on my part to mop the wide expanse of tiled floor. But we conquered the kitchen floor on Tuesday and the upstairs carpet on Wednesday. I timed it just right so I washed the last of the carpet right before we left for our tulip trip. It dried while we were gone and we came back to smooth carpet lines and a kitchen full of furniture.

When I was done with the floors, I marveled at how amazing it felt to have tackled a chore that has been looming over me for so long. I LOVE clean floors. My inner zen just hums with contentment when I see those fresh vacuum lines or my bare feet slide across the scrubbed kitchen floor. For our book club this month, we're reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, and one of the best ideas I've gotten from it is how GOOD it feels to do something you've been putting off. It really did boost my happiness to tackle a task that I've been avoiding--deep cleaning. And now our house is clean! Or it was until I finally started letting people eat food inside again...

 I enlisted Jay and Rose to help scrub. I gave each of them a bucket with a mixture of warm water and Simply Green cleaner and a rag for scrubbin'. We cranked up my "cleaning time" music and started scrubbing. It didn't even feel like a chore while we all helped out--the kids actually enjoyed flinging water all over the floor, and I have a really good cleaning time playlist--Simon and Garfunkel, The Steve Miller Band, Billy Joel, Disney, REO Speedwagon, Poco, Cat Stevens, Alabama, and of course a dash of Queen.

 The reason we hand-scrubbed the floor instead of mopping it was because it was beyond mopping. There were too many spots stuck to the floor that needed a fingernail or sharp edge to scrape off to make mopping effective. I feel sheepish even admitting to the state of our floors. But if I didn't admit to how sticky they were before, you wouldn't understand how wonderful they feel after!

 "Banished" outside for a picnic to preserve My Floors.

 Amber wouldn't promise to stay put at the outdoor picnic, so I had her eat lunch at the counter and then carefully scrubbed up every last smudge around her.

 See how shiny it is? Even the textured tile was shiny after our scrub-a-thon.

This is where my recliner chair used to sit--through two horrific pregnancy sicknesses and four years I never moved it. Check out that nastiness! I can't believe I let it go that long. All I can do is blame all that time I spent trying to eat in that chair--apparently I spilled more than I thought in my agony! But now it is all washed and cleaned up. 

 I sat and just stared at the gorgeous clean carpet after I finished. While I was sitting in the kitchen, I realized something: I still like sitting in my recliner! I have been avoiding that chair like the plague ever since Amber was born because I spent so many sick, nauseous long long hours and days sitting in it while I was pregnant and I was so bored of the chair and the view of the room from that corner. I got bored and annoyed every time I sat in that chair in that corner. I still like the recliner though! Just not the position. So when the carpet dried we put the furniture back in a different configuration, moving the recliner to a different corner. It's not as aesthetically pleasing and the pictures on the wall are now wildly off center, but I can enjoy sitting in my recliner again!

 The trusty Hoover Powerscrub carpet washer that I picked up at Goodwill last year. I cleaned the carpet with straight white vinegar and water. It worked wonders. I filled the detergent container with vinegar and the main chamber with hot water and then went to town. Laaa!

Zen garden carpet. 

Tis the season for heart stopping sunsets.