Getting Ready for the Parentals

Alternatively Titled: Anatomy of a House Cleaning

Alternatively Titled: Why I Will Never Purchase a 130 Year Old House Because


Last night, I spent a couple of hours getting the house ready for my parents to visit tomorrow night.  And by "getting the house ready," I really mean "finding the guest bedroom floor."  I should have taken before pictures.  While the afters I've posted below don't look impressive, anyone who has visited my house in the last couple of weeks (ok, since Christmas...) can attest to the fact that this is very, very, very clean.

At least there is room for the air mattress on the floor.

The problem is that I live in a house with no closet space.  Honestly.  Neither closet is deep enough for a full sized hanger so things hang crookedly.  The master bedroom closet is stuffed to the brim due to my shopping habit and the guest room closet has room for only the Christmas decorations and my luggage and even that is piled pretty precariously.  So cleaning the guest room is always an interesting experience because it's really just a matter of shuffling boxes that don't have anywhere else to go.  This time around, I found some interesting things:

• 2 boxes of craft supplies which I haven't used in at least 1.5 years
• 3 garbage bags of stuff that I threw away because it was crappy and hadn't even been unpacked in the last year
• More magazine than I can possibly count
• 3 pairs of shoes
• 14 cat toys (they're everywhere!)
• A disgusting number of dead flies about the size of a dime - at least the cats are good at killing them but still.  Ick.

I can officially say that my favorite thing I found while cleaning was my TI82 calculator from 8th grade.  The calculator unto itself would be cool but it's even better because it had some serious stickers on it.  Notice the photo stickers - if this picture where better quality you'd have an awesome view of my brother's not-so-awesome hair - and the Joshua Jackson sticker on the back because I was sure he was secretly my boyfriend.

Because of all the crap (see the aforementioned Christmas comment and the 3 garbage bags of... garbage), and really because it's more important to stay on top of keeping the rest of the house at least livable, I hadn't been able to vacuum the guest room for a while.  I tried to keep the cats out of there during the Great Flea Debacle of 2011 simply because it was a HUGE pain in the butt to vacuum this room every day like I was doing with the rest of the house, since getting the little pests (fleas, not cats... more on that later) under control the girls are back to having the guest room as their own person playroom.  Which of course means that it needed a serious vacuuming...

As in, had to empty the vacuum canister three times because Charlie sheds EVERYWHERE.

Speaking of Charlie, and back to the pest comment, the little stinker tried to help me clean.  Or she tried to make it more entertaining.  One or the other.

Apparently that little storage nook up at the ceiling is more fun than I knew, because I also found the following things up there:

• 1 milk ring
• 3 sparkle balls
• 0 cobwebs

I can guarantee that it wasn't me who put those toys up there.  And while Lady Bug can jump pretty darn high, she's not much of a climber and certainly can't jump that high.  Anyone who has heard the "Cat in the Ceiling" story won't be surprised to know that Charlie has a bit of a hideout.  (Haven't heard that story... just ask.  It's a good one.)