The house AND me. I have scrubbed and sweated and then had to disinfect myself because of all those disgusting bathroom germs. Maybe that’s part of my germaphobia/slobbishness together problem. I can’t clean behind the toilet unless I can take a very hot shower immediately after.

There are very good things about having company over. For me, it’s motivation. Motivation that is totally lacking when I don’t have an actual guaranteed doorbell-ring on the calendar. I always tell myself that I should clean like this all the time. We all love the house when it’s clean. And if I cleaned like this one day a week, we’d be ready for anyone who stopped by. I tell myself this, but it never happens. Clutter happens instead. So, the fact that my house looks great right now is definitely not the end of this blog.

I am a serial clutterer. When I see the ladies on slob-intervention tv shows whose homes are piled 3 feet deep with clutter, I have sympathy for them. If left unchecked, I could probably be one of them. My problem is not that I never have the house clean, it’s that I can’t keep it clean. Over and over and over, I let it get back into a terrible state. This is why although I could possibly apply for one of those shows and be accepted, I know that I have to do this slowly and steadily, developing habits and actually changing.

This time, I’m looking at this differently. It’s not a pit-stop, but a jumpstart. I have been working consistently on getting this house in order, and now I am way farther down that road because of my crazy cleaning this week. My husband and I have a running joke. Whenever I clean up a room, I say “You know, I really like it like this. From now on, I think I’ll just keep it this way.” Then we pause for effect and bust out laughing. But this time it has to be different. It has to be.

I definitely could tell in the last two days of heavy cleaning that my work of the past few weeks has paid off. I didn’t start out at a deficit in the kitchen or bathrooms. If I could keep the clutter under control, maybe I really could do a thorough cleaning on a regular basis.

I do want to be completely honest. I say my “whole house.” However, I will still be using one of my old tricks. The master bedroom has a lock on the door. It is definitely not company worthy yet, and I’m not going to worry about it. It is my ultimate goal to leave that door open when people come over, but realistically that is a lot of work away.

The only problem with my brilliant trick is that once I lock the door, I can’t unlock it without completely removing the doorknob with a screwdriver. This means that I have to make a last call for anything needed in that room before locking it right as people arrive. If that fantastic picture of the fish my husband just caught gets left in there, tough.

My poor sweet husband.