I'm not a particularly clean person. Not that I'm disgusting or anything, I do the necessary minimum, but I've never been one to, you know, put the mini-blinds in the bath tub with some Clorox to get them their sparkling white-y whitest. (It took me a while to come up with an example of what a seriously clean person might do, so if that is a ridiculously lame and/or improbable example, well, there you go. I don't know what I'm talking about in this arena.)*
I'm also a terrible procrastinator, but that's an issue for another post.
Put these two tendencies together and you understand why I'm panicking at the thought of selling our house. We've signed with a real estate agent and she came over to our house two weeks ago to walk around with me and kind of point out the things we needed to clean up/organize/pack before the first open house. She originally wanted to have the first open house on the 28th (this past Sunday!) but as we walked around, she said, "Oh, you're not going to be ready by the 28th. Let's push it back to February 11th."
And thank god we did, because there is no way we would have been ready by then. KB has been doing his best to help out, picking up here and there when he comes home at night, but it's mostly up to me, and I am not good at this! All the little half-done projects that I've been meaning to get to (spackle that hole in the wall, put all those recipes back in the binder, go through my clothes to decide what to donate to Goodwill, vacuum the cat hair off of the roman shade above their perch) are now looming with the urgency that only comes when total strangers will be invading your house to decide if they like it or not. ACK!
So I've been stocking up on cleaning supplies and those Rubbermaid storage bins like mad, but the coolest thing I've found has got to be:
The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.
This thing is truly astonishing.
Exhibit A: My 50+ year old some-kind-of-plastic-surface kitchen counter after being wiped down with a regular kitchen sponge and Simple Green, our cleaner of choice. Looks okay, right? Not blindingly clean, there's that stubborn cup ring that never comes out, but good enough for government work.
Exhibit B: Same counter. Can you tell where I've wiped with the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser?
Exhibit C: Now can you tell?
Exhibit D: Now I've cleaned the whole thing.
I said God DAMN!
I'm going to go back to the store and buy out their supply of these things. (The only drawback that I've found so far is that the pad tends to disintegrate pretty quickly, but it was only $2.50 for two of the things, so what the hey.)
Maybe, just maybe, with the help of my bald, earringed savior, we'll be ready for the open house in (less than) two weeks. ACK!
Thanks for reading.
*Ooh! I just thought of a better one! I'm not the kind of person who takes the burner cover thingees off of the stovetop and cleans around and under them to get all the gook that builds up in the crevices around them. That's what I should have said. I never do that!
2 comments:
Wow. I am going to have to get me one of those new fangled eraser thingys. Keep your chin up! Focus on small bits and not the whole picture to avoid feeling overwhelmed. When in doubt- throw it away!
THIS is why blogs were invented. That's so helpful. I can't wait to buy some tonight.
Also, I hear you on the cleaning. I finally realized a year or two ago that, like dancing and Krav Maga, I'm just no good at cleaning. Like, cleaning as you described, like those insane, yet gifted individuals. Like my Mom, I guess. I finally stopped beating myself up and got a cleaning person, and just recently, got over the guilt of having a cleaning person. I only have them come over every two months or so (ie, right before company), but it's cheap enough ($50) and makes all the difference, and helps me keep my sanity.
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