Elbow Grease and Laundry Day

You know what I hate about laundry?

It's never, ever over.

Never.  Unless you decide to go naked for a week, there will always be more.  You recall that Tuesday, when I came home, more laundry had materialized.  I did that all of that, (at the neighbor's house, because our dryer is broken, and screw laundromats) and then thought to myself whew! Done with THAT noise!

Except not.  Because MORE laundry was hiding in the living room that I cleaned yesterday.  It just never, ever ends. Ugh.

I should mention that my best friend, her daughter (my goddaughter and the prettiest little girl this side of the Mississippi), and her parents are coming to visit next weekend (insert high-pitched girlish squeal here), and our house kind of looks like a disaster zone. Don't get me wrong, we aren't living in our own filth or anything, but there's random crap everywhere; the knickknacks and doodads that never got put in their real homes when we moved in, the shelves we still haven't hung, that sort of thing.  Then there's this lovely layer of Simon hair over all of it.

Anyways, there will be people here in less than two weeks, and the house is in no shape for it.  So this is why I've been cleaning everything in sight all week, and avoiding the horror story that is our living room.  But Caitlyn was cleaning hers yesterday, and I was inspired, so I cleaned ours.

It's now mostly clutter free, (although I still get to sweep, vacuum, and mop) and I did something I've never done before. I scrubbed the upholstery.  Caitlyn had been cleaning her couch with a mixture of laundry detergent, fabric softener and hot water, and I thought Huh. Why didn't I think of that?

Because I wasn't mentally or emotionally prepared for the filth I would discover, that's why.

We have this micro-suede armchair that I got for $12 at a Goodwill back home.  It's big and cozy, and it was twelve dollars. I mean, come on.  In retrospect, I really should have done this cleaning thing when I bought it. But I didn't, and it sat (and was sat on) in my Raleigh apartment for nine months, and then came with us to Fort Benning, where it became a drop zone for anything that we didn't feel like putting away just then.

I consider myself to be a fairly clean person.  So, alright, I'm not so good with the clutter, but I consider that to be "relaxed with my personal space," not dirty.  I sweep and mop regularly, out of necessity because our entire house has linoleum floors.  I clean the kitchen obsessively, to the point you would think I don't want people to know that I actually cook there.  The dogs get a bath every time they dig in the yard.  Lysol and multi-surface Pledge are on the list of top 100 things that make me happy. I don't do dirt, okay?

But this chair.  It took three buckets of the hot-water-fabric-softener-laundry-detergent mixture to clean the whole thing, because the water turned colors I didn't know existed, and I simply couldn't justify using it to clean anymore.  I mean, it didn't look dirty.  It wasn't stained, it didn't have globs of food or spilled juice or anything on it.  But once I started cleaning it, I realized how thoroughly disgusting it was.

In fact, I'm so disgusted by the whole ordeal, I now feel compelled to repeat entire performance on every piece of upholstered furniture I own before I sit on it again.  So I guess now I've revealed my agenda for today...