Enforced cleaning

Everyone needs a day or two when there are going to be service engineers in their house!

No I mean it.

One of the advantages for us is the cleaning.
No they don't do it, I do but it is enormous motivation :D

Our house is usually the pit of Hell.
Things are everywhere.
I used to clean religiously every weekend when we both worked and all the time when I stopped to have kids.
Then as the years went on and the OH continued to drop the wrappings from post and parcels.
Leave  clothes everywhere ,never wipe his spills or clean the basin ,bath or loo after use and fill the kitchen drawers with his motorbike tools, I turned from a tidy to an untidy person.
It was necessary to maintain sanity.

Now the only time the house really gets any kind of organisation is when a service person must visit to do maintenance

This last couple of weeks we have had the gas engineer and the plumber.
Our house is at the moment relatively civilized.
The kitchen is clean enough to not give you the horrors if you are offered a cup of tea and the bathroom looks like you could wash in the basin without becoming any dirtier.
The loo has no horrors to speak of either. Well okay if you are a prima donna (or OH's sister) you will most likely need for us to buy a whole new bathroom suite before you will set foot through the door but for normal everyday visitors,it is acceptable.
Actually if you need to go, you really don't care what state the only available loo is in as I can readily avow after several years of homeschool camping in  fields with a compost loo and the need to use it after various unaccompanied toddlers have been there first.

Other times when cleaning takes place are....
OH's relatives are visiting or
He has an exam to do at home.
As neither of these things reflect on me in any way(I mentally turn off ) ,I can happily let him play house cleaner in mad desperation.

Reading that last , I expect you are thinking that I am a mean and lazy person .
I don't care.
When I cared, I would spend days cleaning it all away only to watch it build up in new layers before the visits had even taken place.
I think if I hadn't decided to shrug and turn my back on it, I would  be in a mental institution.

One very liberating thought came to me a couple of weeks back.
I was watching the film
Winters bone.
It was all about a family who lived on a homestead in the US.
The film depicts several families in a largish area all going about their days .
Every house had its little idiosyncrasies.
Pictures and musical instruments.
Clothes in piles.
Home made things lying around.
How free I thought.

Well that is what I want.
I like the idea of being free too.
Why should we have to hide our every day selves from visitors who either don't know us or don't like us or both.

Its our house and we can live in it any way we like.

When the kids were little, the health visitor who would come and weigh my daughter said she liked our house because it looked like someone lived here.