Lord, I need a cleaning service, I really do. Pretty much all this month has been taken up with digging out this house and turning it into a place where you can welcome people without them recoiling in horror, waving furiously at the dust.

Or to be more specific, my sister’s coming for a visit. I haven’t seen her since January 2020, and she’s vaxxed and really wanted to come down for a long weekend so I said do it, hence the deep clean of the house.

The worst part was probably the guest room, which hasn’t been used for its regular purpose in four years and has instead been a designated Final Destination for junk that needed to go upstairs, be sorted through by Lyndon, yadda yadda yadda. But no longer is that the case. Sunday Lyndon pulled all of the junk out of there, lifted the bed up against the wall and vacuumed thoroughly underneath it. I then took down the drapes and a wall hanging and washed them, washed the window, dusted/washed every piece of furniture and decor in the room, dusted the ceiling fan, vacuumed the carpet again and then shampooed it. When I put the bed back down, I discovered that the J Crew had left a few pee deposits here and there before they were permanently barred from the room, so I had to get rid of those. Luckily I have a gallon jug of My Pet Peed, which lifted everything out of the mattress and made it like new again. Today I went through and organized the closet, which included washing everything fabric that had been stored in there and hanging up a mothball bar to fend off moths. The room is currently a thing of very bare beauty, as I’m not putting on the new bedding/mattress cover until the morning of my sister’s arrival.

The weird thing is, while this has definitely been a huge time sink I feel so much better knowing that it’s done. I don’t actually like having a dirty house, and the guest room has been preying at the back of my mind for four years. Now that it’s tidy and smelling nice, I feel like I can relax.

Well, once I finish cleaning the rest of the house, that is. Technically, I still have the kitchen, upstairs bath, craft room, my office, master bedroom and master bath to do. Realistically I’ll get the kitchen, upstairs bath, and my office cleaned. The craft room will be vacuumed and if I can get the master bedroom/bath done, great, but those rooms are the least of my worries right now. I can always clean them after she goes home.

Now the question is, once I get the place clean can I keep it clean? Stay tuned.