I spoke to a woman once who was exhausted from cleaning her house because she was about to go on a vacation.
If you aren’t personally a slob, I’ll just explain that to a slob this makes absolutely no sense. We only clean when someone is going to see the house. Going on vacation means that the house will be locked up for a while and there’s no reason to clean. Besides, I always spend the day before a vacation digging through piles of stuff to find what I need to pack, doing last minute loads of laundry in order to have enough clean undies to last the trip.
I do know that there are reasons to clean before a trip. What if a pipe burst and your house flooded and neighbors noticed the water coming out of your windows and rushed inside your house to turn off the water, and tripped over clutter and drowned? What if you had a wreck and someone had to go inside your house to get your pajamas to bring to you in the hospital? And really, it would be nice to have the neighbor kid come check on the dog instead of driving an hour out of the way to drop her at grandma’s. Yes, there are reasons to clean. But being all “ifs” they just aren’t enough for me.
However, I will say that it was nice to come home to a clean kitchen today. We were only gone one night, and something does smell somewhere, but the main three rooms of the house look great. We actually are having a group in our home tonight, and I’m sitting here writing instead of running around frantically shoving things into drawers and cabinets. If I can figure out what that smell is, we’ll be in great shape!
I’m still not sure that I would do a deep cleaning before a trip, but it’s nice to come home and not have to wonder whether or not your house was broken into and ransacked.
