Stop the presses, we're hosting guests

We're having a friend of mine from law school and her fiance over for dinner tonight, and amazingly, I do not feel freaked out/crazed/insane yet.

In part, we had to clear up the apartment somewhat Thursday night, so someone could tour it Friday (our apartment management company is trying to sell the units as condos, someone wanted to see our floor plan - which, admittedly, is great - and no one else with our floor plan could let them in for various reasons. Please, please, PLEASE send good thoughts out to the universe that our particular unit doesn't sell before we have to move in August!!).

So I have not spent the ENTIRE day cleaning frantically, which is my usual m.o. for hostessing - just PART of the day.

But now the floor is clean (or pretty close; it's cherry wood, and cherry wood + cat hair + cat litter dust + regular dust is a nightmare. Note to self: we will NEVER have cherry wood floors!), and the apartment smells nicely of the almond floor cleaner I use; there's a lasagna sitting in the fridge waiting to go into the oven in about half an hour; I've made the salad dressing and roasted the nuts that go on top. The bed linens are clean and the bed is made, the bathroom floor is mopped, the carpet is vacuumed, and the kitchen counters and cooktop are clean. I need to slice apples for the salad, make garlic bread, and cook/assemble stuff - oh, and shower - but for once, I feel kind of top of it all. 

Okay, it's not perfect - I'm not Martha Stewart - but it should suffice. 

Whenever we get the apartment all nice and fresh and clean like this, I think, "Why don't we just KEEP it this way?" I know by now we probably won't. (NLLDH and I have semi-incompatible approaches to home organization and cleaning, and even though I think I'm right, he would beg to differ, so that's all I'll say about it.) I suppose this just means we need to have people over more often.

(Apart from the fact that socially, we really really should have people over more often.)

Comments

[What Now?]

Hah -- I hope that D. and I will be in the same position next week. We're having a guest over for post-church Sunday brunch, which means that I have a week to get the house clean.

I always have the same experience you do: when the house is clean, I feel so calm and happy and wonder why we don't keep it that way all the time. But I know it won't happen. I agree with you that the clear remedy is to just have guests over more often! Probably once a month would be enough to keep things reasonably clean and also to jazz up our social life!

Enjoy your company tonight.

[itsprobablyphdme]

Honestly, the only time my house is clean is when I entertain. You should have seen the place before my parents came in the fall! I should really have people over more often than every six months.

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

Our cats freak out when we clean the house, because they know that only happens when Strange People are coming over or we're about to leave on a trip.

[Chels]

1. I want to come to your house! It sounds wonderful from the clean linens to the lasagna to the roasted nuts to the almond scented cleaning
2. I am having my house cleaned this week, and it's been a big deal thinking about taking on this expense (but my summer is going to be busy, and for a variety of reasons, I am), and have now become really defensive about the state of my house, very dismayed at some dust bunny discoveries. I get why people say they "clean" before someone comes to clean.

[ADM]

That would be any wood floors... It's especially fun with stairs, because it means that anything next to the stairs also needs dusting.

[Dr. Moonbeam]

Heh. I hear you on that; we almost never get anything cleaned unless company is expected. Well, okay, I dusted one set of bookshelves this weekend because I was moving a lot of books around to add in the many that I just bought, but that was unusual.

Hope you all had an excellent time!

[Mary Anne Mohanraj]

Alternative: make enough money to hire cleaners. Starting a few months ago, we actually have someone come every other week, and since we have to pick up so she can clean, it actually has transformed the overall neatness of our home. In that now only one or two spaces are disasters at any given moment. You can actually walk into rooms and have them be already clean. It's like magic.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

What Now? - I hope your cleaning has gone well and as stresslessly as possible!

itsprobablyme - I know, I should do the same! my mom doesn't really travel any more so I don't even have fear of parental disapproval to motivate me.

Pilgrim - ha! I love it. I think cleaning makes Middle Cat nervous, now you mention it (though she, like all cats, loves to get involved with making the bed....).

Chels - how nice of you to say my home sounds nice! :-) And I love the idea of cleaners, but I'd bet you I'd have the same anxieties about how the place looked before they got there!

ADM - seriously, cherry (or dark walnut) floors are a special kind of hell - I've had pine and oak floors a bunch of times before, and they're nowhere near as bad as the dark ones!

Dr. Moonbeam - I always end up dusting the bookshelves if I have to move books around - because it's the only time I do it! (Whenever we move I'm horrified at how dusty the books have become.)

Mary Anne - that's my ultimate goal! We keep saying that we're going to do that - pay for cleaners - but our bottom line is that we both have to be working (for pay) to justify it, and after 3 years of me in law school we don't feel up to it just yet. (It's not so much the student loans as that we couldn't pay down credit cards while I was on student loans, sigh...) It won't be next year, but maybe the year after that...