Here is something I need to tell you. I am a grown woman. I have owned multiple homes. I have raised children. And I have only recently discovered that people wash their walls.
WASH. THEIR. WALLS.
Like, regularly. On purpose. As a thing they just... do!
I am sharing this because we are getting our house ready to sell and the cleaning journey has been equal parts transformative and genuinely alarming! Come with me...
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I Am a Project Cleaner (There Is a Name for This)
Here is the thing about me and cleaning... I am not lazy. I am just wired completely wrong for the kind of cleaning that actually keeps a house clean.
According to the brilliant Dana K. White of A Slob Comes Clean, I am what is known as a "project cleaner." Doing small, incremental maintenance tasks that don't produce a visible result? Deeply boring. Cannot make myself do it... sigh.
But getting down on the floor of my son's bathroom and cleaning the grout with a toothbrush until it goes from dark grey to actually white? That is my sweet spot. That is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
The before and after of that bathroom is genuinely chef's kiss. I wish I could show you my soul leaving my body with satisfaction when I was done.
The problem, of course, is that a house cleaned exclusively by a project cleaner is a house where the grout gets scrubbed twice a decade and the ceiling fans look like small hairy animals slowly rotating overhead!
Which brings me to my next confession...
My Mom Did Not Teach Me How to Clean (Because She Also Did Not Clean)
My best friend Rebekah heard me describing my cleaning struggles on our weekly Zoom and immediately said, "Didn't your mom teach you how to clean?"
NO, she did NOT.
My mom was an absolute force of nature - but in the best possible way. She was teaching at a community college in the 1980s when women were entering the workforce in droves, and she was personally helping every single one of them get a job. She sat on the boards of more local charities than I can count. She could get things done that nobody else even dreamed of attempting.
Our dining room table, however, was never cleared off except for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
When my grandparents came over for Sunday dinner we all sat in the living room eating off TV trays watching television - we had a massive satellite dish in the backyard that could pick up the feed for upcoming TV shows, which is how I watched Star Trek The Next Generation before it aired to the rest of the world. At the time I thought this was completely normal. I had NO idea.
The only cleaning that ever happened in our house was when my brother Todd and I were assigned dusting or vacuuming duty. That was it. That was the whole cleaning program.
Come to find out there is significantly more to keeping a house clean than that.
Mind-Blowing Things I Have Learned During This Process
I want to be clear that I am sharing these because I genuinely believe there are other people out there who did not know these things either and they deserve to feel less alone:
People wash their walls. On a regular basis. Not just when something is visibly splattered on them. They just... wash the walls. I found this out mid-conversation and had to sit with it for a minute.
Ceiling fans should not look like hairy animals. I always just thought that was what ceiling fans looked like after a while. Turns out you are supposed to clean them. Frequently.
Grout can be white. Not dark beige. Not grey. Not the color of a sad secret. White. Actual white. This discovery was life-changing and is the reason I spent three hours on the floor of a bathroom with a toothbrush and emerged victorious!
Things I Did Not Know You Should Use Your Vacuum For
This section alone should tell you everything about the gaps in my cleaning education. I thought a vacuum was for floors. FLOORS. That is it. That is what I thought vacuums were for.
Wrong. So very wrong.
Cleaning crumbs out of drawers before you wash them. You vacuum first, THEN you wipe. This never occurred to me. I was just moving crumbs around with a damp cloth like some kind of cleaning goblin, which is exactly what I am!
Cleaning window tracks. The move here is to take a paintbrush and work all the dirt loose from the track, and THEN vacuum up all the debris. I tried this. It was disgusting and deeply satisfying in equal measure.
Cleaning fabric window blinds. Ours are the soft fabric kind, which - who thought that was a good idea?!? The internet cleaning guy said you can use the vacuum on them. I am working up to this one.
I am for sure not using my vacuum to its full potential and I feel I owe it an apology!
The Lysol Incident
When you use enough Lysol with bleach, your fingertips stop working on your iPhone.
I believe I have genuinely burned off my fingerprints. I am scrubbing things into a clean submission and losing my identity in the process. This is where we are now.
Why This Was Never a Problem Before
I have been thinking about why the cleaning situation got so out of hand and I have a theory... we moved a lot.
After my husband and I got married in 2002 we moved approximately five times before we adopted our kids in 2014. Every few years I got a reset - the big moving clean, fresh paint, new place, new start. A whole new house to cheerfully under-clean for another couple of years before we moved again.
Other than my childhood home, this is the longest I have ever lived in one place. And it is 3,300 square feet. That is a lot of square footage to be in denial about. I was absolutely overwhelmed and defaulted to the bare minimum - mopped the floors, dusted the surfaces, called it a day.
The Person Who Actually Taught Me to Clean
Here is the sweetest part of this whole story. We adopted our daughter from foster care when she was fifteen. She arrived knowing how to clean - really clean - and it was from watching her that I first realized you are supposed to use multiple squirts of cleaning product, not just one tentative little spritz.
Her birth mom must have been a serious cleaner before her troubles started. That knowledge lived in my girl and she brought it into our home with her. I think about that sometimes.
The Worst Part About Cleaning
The absolute worst thing about cleaning is that once you start, you cannot stop seeing things.
I cleaned my son's bathroom yesterday. Did a thorough, toothbrush-on-the-grout, Lysol-fingertip-sacrificing job. Walked in today and immediately noticed a spot on his sink.
Before the deep clean that spot would have been the least of my worries. It would have been invisible to me. But now that I am a raving cleaning lunatic, that spot might as well be three feet wide and personally offensive!
This is what cleaning does to you. Consider yourself warned.
What Comes Next
I am committed to being a genuinely better cleaner in our next house. The good news is that I have learned SO much during this process - tips, hacks, products, and techniques that actually work - and I will be sharing all of it with my newsletter peeps as we go!
If you are also a project cleaner who just discovered that walls are a thing people wash, welcome. You are in the right place. We are going to figure this out together!
Subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss a single tip - Also if anyone has advice for getting fingerprint recognition to work again after a Lysol incident, I am all ears!
