Desperate Housewives of ILX

Dear housewives,

The time has come. Frenzied cleaning purges, fits of temper and closet-space emergencies: all welcome here. Yes, there are moments in our lives when we are defined by our housework. Times when our husbands aren't home, and we are left to our own devices. If these walls could talk....

Coffee, anyone?

i just got a new vacuum named Regina.

well it's actually a new old vacuum. she's from like the 60s. but she works great!

so much to do. not sure when i'm going to do it. i need a housework day.

tbh i'm considering calling a cleaning service for a one-time super clean.

omg ryan and i just made the same decision. i know, feels like such a cop. but we need to paint the bathroom and i think a super clean first would be beneficial.

we got the house super cleaned for my mom on her birthday

that is a very awesome present

i was just writing a friend an email because once when she was at my house, she said that my living room was nice, but that my bathroom and bedroom were "shitty." at the time i was angry, but i also made a laundry list of all the things i needed to do around the house, and i did them. so i just wrote her an email thanking her for her honesty. sometimes the truth hurts.

Yeah I think a one time super clean could take a bit of stress out of my relationship!

Maybe I am weak for not summoning the energy to 'do it all' or maybe I am just an empowered woman for saying, 'hey, I don't have to do this if I don't want to!!'

honey, there's really only so much we can do in a day

i spent an entire day cleaning our house before we went on vacation, and within two days of getting back, the whole place looks like a bomb site :/

i can think of many an ardent housekeeper i could never love as well as i love thee, justin3.

my house is also currently dreadful.

Why do people never clean their kitchen cupboards why why why. How can they stand that the layers of grease make the doors actually STICK to their fingers? I'm dreading all the work of cleaning yet another person's kitchen so I can not feel kind of gross about using it, and I just wonder whyyyyyy.

Also I washed the floors of my new place today and whoever mopped/swept left kitty litter scattered around part of the living room. Maybe this hiring a cleaning person idea would give me some breathing room while I put normal life back together?

i think sometimes people go to clean their kitchen cupboards but just as they are about to start they realise it's going to be a very boring way to spend the next hour or so and so they do something else instead.

i remember when i realized i had to clean the outside of my kitchen cupboards. it was a real lightbulb moment.

It's not that it's fun, it's that the stickiness and grease nag me and take the enjoyment out of other things until I do it. I know it's only going to get that way again, but I have a compulsion to at least START OUT clean.

yes, i always have to start out clean in a new place because other people's layers of grease is completely gross, but i do have some tolerance of my own. only up to a point though. my main housekeeping problem is clutter, books and papers.

the thing about moving into our current place was that it was completely, spotlessly clean - that lasted all of a couple weeks.

i would really like to hire someone to clean my bathroom and the kitchen floor.

I think even once a year would be FINE for cupboards! I'm hoping ammonia will be enough to do the trick, because I bought a large bottle of it today.

estela, I do know a trick for the books that always (always) pile up, that might help: I just don't consider them clutter. Once your eyes adjust, you'll be amazed how much better the room looks!

i've noticed that when writers and academics get interviewed in their own studies, many of them have loony piles of books and jutting papers and folders in apparently uncategorised stacks on their desks and floors so the room looks sort of tidy, but you can tell the stacks were hastily formed that morning before the interview, and that now they won't be able to find anything they need for weeks.

I once briefly worked for an editor whose motto was "piles, not files." I hated him for it.

that's a sorry looking bunch of commas up there. xp

Mostly because he wanted me to sit with him and hold up one piece of paper at a time, describe it to him, and note where he said it should go...and then amass piles relating to certain projects and keep them straight and separate. It was the whole "holding up sheets of his own correspondence and reading lines off to him until he recognized it" that killed me.

i would hate him too.

i'm moving in about a month and a half. i need to go on a mad cleaning spree so we can get all or most of our security deposit back!

I am a terrible housecleaner because (1) I hate cleaning and (2) I just don't know how to do it on a regular basis, I only only do it when it gets so gross that I can't stand it anymore and cleaning is somewhat satisfying because it looks visibly different. I totally hate cleaning. I don't even really know how to do it right tbh.

i clean the kitchen more than any other room, because i cook a lot and food bits end up on the counter, the floor, the stove, etc. my fear of bugs and varmints outweighs my dislike of cleaning.

Oh, that's when I do it, too, A. I'm not one of those people who dusts weekly or something, heaven forfend. I wash the floors when I can't stand the amount of sand/hair/schmutz sticking to my feet, I do laundry when I've handwashed all my bras at least twice already, and I wash out the fridge when...it looks like the fridge I'm going to be sharing as of tomorrow.

Also I'm with JBR about the fear of bugs.

o_O

Don't get me wrong -- I also cook a lot and I do regularly clean the kitchen. My threshold for not being able to stand it is fairly low in the kitchen. In the other rooms, not as much.

same, where i live is sub-tropical so i don't dare leave food and dirty dishes lying around, there would be bugs everywhere.

I secretly LOVE to leave dirty dishes in the sink, that's my chosen decadence: cooking and eating and saying "Fuck it, those plates will still be there in the morning and I'm okay with that."

another thing is i cannot stand to have my bare feet on a sticky or crumby floor, feeling things sticking to my feet sends me through the roof, so i tend to keep the floors very clean as well.

Yes, that's what I meant about what forces me to clean, any schmutz being tracked around on my feet. Also I'm anti-mop. It's a rag and a bucket and accept no substitutes.

I guess one of those squeegee mops would be fine for the middle of large open floors, but for the edges and the baseboards and the kick-plates under the counter, you're not going to get the debris except by hand.

I look forward to having fewer opinions about cleaning when I can relegate it to the 37th place spot in my life that it deserves. Between one thing and another I've been cleaning in hyper-mode for over a year, and I'll be happy to put that behind me.

i finally just got a dustbuster for the first time in years. i really don't know what i was doing without one.

i'm fairly neat, i think (though things might not always be in their proper places, they at least have proper places). but i find that kitty's ability to make things furry outstrips my motivation to clean.

Someone Lauren and ian and I know threw up her hands and had both her cats shaved about 3 mos ago. They looked funny for a while but it kept cat hair at bay.

my dog never sheds hair, i'm so glad.

lucky. i buy a ton of those lint roller things.

(and they are not very cheap. i just discovered they sell refills for cheaper)

it's actually not as bad as i would have anticipated (or i'm less militant/more lazy about it). but there are some things like throw blankets or shirts of a certain fabric that just cannot be de-furred.

it's a good thing he's so fucking cute

<3 he certainly is.

ha - we don't have a problem with pet hair; we have a problem with MY hair! i recently complained to ytth that our vacuum was a useless piece of shit, so he sat done for half an hour and removed the equivalent of a decent head's worth of hair from the little bristle things. it made a difference!

Hair wrapped around the axles will strain those little rubber belts that run the beaters until they burn out and snap. I remember the smell of burning hair and rubber quite well from my childhood spend using one of several vintage vacuums that my dad could always repair.

i actually hate clutter even more than i hate dirtiness. dealing with dirt is straightforward, if somewhat time-consuming and back-breaking, but clutter drives me crazy. finding places for things, sorting through and figuring out what to dump... ugh. and i just hate piles of stuff. it makes feel irrationally stressed out. when i moved to the US i was sad to let go of so many of my possessions, but goddamn it was freeing to only own 2 suitcases of stuff, instead of an entire household.

and laurel: i'm totally with you re mops. what is even the point of them, unless you use them literally every day, before the grime can get trampled into the floor.

uhh the fact that there is even anything called Silestone of Zodiac kind of just made my night

well technically that should read Silestone *or* Zodiac, but I'm with you on this one!

haha :>)

how we all doing, girls?

Still desperate.

still a housewife here.

everything OK quincie?

I love my dustbuster really a lot a lot. Because I have wooden floors with cracks in them, and no rugs to speak of.

Also my landlords put a washer/dryer in our basement a couple of months ago. I still have to walk outside my building to get down there but I'm not complaining.

Not really focused on my house other than those things.

that's so nice about the laundry. ALSO I NEED A NEW DUSTBUSTER really badly. do you have a rec?

literally just wrote "dustbuster" down in my book

my house has been a disgusting cess pool for the longest time. i've been maintaining the living room for a few weeks, miraculously, and the bathroom is only a couple weeks out from it's last thorough clean (bleached all the mold off the ceilings!). but the bedroom and kitchen area are just .... ugh.

my new favourite bathroom cleaning diy is baking soda mixed into a paste with hydrogen peroxide and maybe a squirt of dr bronner's. smear it all over the tub and let it sit a while, come back give it a quick scrub before rinsing.

i want to be one of those people who maintains some sort of cleanliness and tidiness, instead of waiting til it's so bad that you're embarrassed for even your closest friends to see it.

i get that. we hire a cleaning lady once every like 3 months. between then i do upkeep but i need to get better at it. baking soda/toothbrush for the bathroom is always a good trick i feel.

i actually just called my cleaning gal - i should ask her to do the bathroom ceilings, i've been thinking about that.

Fuck it I bleach everything in the bathroom like once every couple of months and call it good. I know a lot of ppl consider that disgusting but that's the compromise I've made between with living with a man who is not tidy and who will never, never clean anything no matter how bad it gets, and my own feelings of resentment and frustration because I'm not his housekeeper.

Otoh I owe him a tidy sum for the bills and he hasn't asked for it bc he knows I don't have it, so things do kinda go both ways but it's not always a comfortable balance.

My dustbuster btw is an 18-volt Shark cordless. I wish it weren't purple but other than that it works great.

that's kinda how it is with me & mr veg. It means parts of the house can get kinda gross but i just dont give enough of a shit about cleaning to let it become A Thing

my Ryan does all the laundry, dishes and clothing, so i'm all for keeping up appearances around the house. sometimes it pisses me off when he blatantly let things get dirty but i try not to let it get to me.

*laundry, dishes and COOKING

if he blatantly starved u you'd have complaint imo

btw hi surm

ps I do dishes, cooking and clothes in ours also hence my batting for yr fella.

hiiii! ok here's the the thing though - "doing the laundry" means taking it to the laundromat and having them do it.

listen, i keep the place *immaculate* so that when he gets home for the night, no thing is out of place. it takes a lot of time!

good system imo

if it was up to me i'd wear disposable coveralls and never do the laundry ever, i haaaaaate it so much

luckily mr veg likes laundry-doing

i'm kind of a "let things get messy and then make plans to invite someone over so i have an excuse to spend the week before that wiping down every possible surface" person.

bleached all the mold off the ceilings!

Hey, I don't know if this will help but our bathroom used to be a mildew FARM (small room, no ventilation). It permeated the drywall and eventually crept through any paint applied over it. Then I got grossed out and did the whole thing (ceiling and all) with a Zinsser anti-mold primer/sealer, and several coats of gloss latex paint on top of that. It has never come back in a single place.

Oh I guess I used semi-gloss. It still sheds water pretty well, and anyway I think it was the primer that did the trick.

that sounds like too much hard work! tbh i don't know why the mold started - we've lived here for 18 months and it only just started appearing a few months ago (we have a big window that we open after every shower).

i just sprayed just x-14 on a wet swiffer and it took all of 3 mins (we have a tiny bathroom).

Dustbusters - I have this one or one that looks similar which is pretty neat: http://www.blackanddecker.co.uk/homeproducts/productdetails/catno/PD1202N/
it's bullshit that you don't need to touch the dirt when emptying though

yeah i think i like black and decker, thx

i like a p sturdy dustbuster

i also like the ones with the nice wide flat front, very 80s. i don't know why a lot of the ones i see in the store now are pointier in the front.

this morning i felt like everything was down to a science

even when the coffee machine filter broke, i was able to put it back together. i felt very accomplished.

It's great, isn't it?! I know it's a small thing but it's good to feel capable of handling whatever stirs your carefully arranged shit up, and then mopping the floor w it.

i have been the primary domestic partner in our household for the past 6 months or so as my boyfriend has been working 1 full time job that drives him crazy, and 2 part time jobs to save up money so he can leave the full-time gig. i've been doing groceries, laundry, cooking, dishes, and general housework by myself most of the time. BUT he is going to be leaving his full-time job soon so i will be granted some time off. i'm excited about it.

that's awesome. p sure you're a great housewife tho fwiw

and xp yes it's great

also i want a new couch so i can stop dressing our current one in twin bedsheets

i hear that

I would like...a couch.

i did the impossible and cleaned so many rooms last month and have been keeping them clean and it is the best feeling

BEST

xp what do you sit on currently?

My computer chair, my bed. I have some slipper chairs for when company comes, but I don't have anywhere to flop down and read a book.

I bought a couch I really liked from Housing Works for $50 about...14 years ago? But then a roommate's cats destroyed it down to the wood frame in like 2007 and I've never bought another one. I used to look at used ones all the time but it doubles the cost of the sofa to get someone to pick it up and move it in for you and I guess I never bothered.

I always thought some day I'd make enough money that I could pick out a new one and have it delivered, but that kind of didn't happen either.

At this point it's like a hazy future dream: Some day I'll have enough room and enough stability and enough $$ to pick out one I really like.

oh please, honey, no shame: we're still subsisting off the IKEA couch my boyfriend's deceased grandfather had for years. i got posh when i upgraded to black couch pillow covers.

i just offered to host my entire department at work for a retreat at my apartment.

....

Good thing it's well appointed and clean!!

:) :) x

i have started grocery shopping again! it's really a game-changer

...as opposed to?

honestly i was buying lunch every day, and then eating whatever my boyfriend would make for dinner. but he's been doing all the grocery shopping for years and he doesn't always know what i like. so i've made it a point to start making regular trips to the store - and now i have things in the fridge like grapes and cold cuts! what a thought!

i try to do a weekly trip on fridays, saves $$ through the week

i just bought arugula for a salad -- i think i will prepare it with pine nuts, pears, and goat cheese.

also, i now make coffee every morning instead of buying it. i walk down to the office kitchen, i wash the thing, i scoop the coffee out, i press the On button. it's all very calming.

surm I had that yesterday with honey mustard grilled chicken and no pears
when you buy groceries you get to pick yourself up a treat, don't forget

thank you for the reminder! i almost did last time. and yes - i was definitely thinking honey would go in there as well :)