A Nice House

We recently had a leak in our roof.  The next to last big storm we had opened up a large portion of the roof and my husband who was home at the time (luckily) came upstairs to find water pouring through the bedroom window.  Being the handy man that he is, he got what he needed and plugged the hole to save further damage.  After the rain stopped, he got some kind of material and patched the hole himself and then called a roofer.

The roofer called this morning to give us our options.  Of course there was the tear off option where the roof portion would be torn down to the rafters and then rebuilt (the more expensive option) or we could make do with a larger patch.  I am not sure which way to go because he didn't give me the cost, but requested to talk to my husband who has been dealing with him.  In this case I don't mind him dealing with my husband; but that's another entry.  At the end of the conversation, he remarked that we had a very nice house.

It makes me smile to have a total stranger tell me that.  My husband and I work very hard to keep up the house.  Granted my husband still has not finished the bathroom, and neither of us are very fastidious housekeepers, but we try to keep the place tidy overall.  If we know we are having guests over, we clean thoroughly, but generally that doesn't happen otherwise and there are clothes, magazines, and dust lying about. Especially now that the summer is here, we spend more attention to the outside.  So it is really nice to hear that our hard work has paid off.  Because, yes, I think we do have a nice house and I am pretty proud of it.

Dust

I will be the first to admit that I am a lousy housekeeper. It is very low on my priority list and given the amount of stuff I do I would rather do that than clean my house. I really hate it. I like the end result, but I feel totally helpless with the amount of work that needs to be done when I am doing it. It just doesn’t seem to end. But sometimes I get into these moods and have to clean. It seems to me a matter of camouflage more than anything else. If it looks clean then I am okay with it. If it is tidy, then I am good.


So this weekend I got into one of those moods and started with the living room and ended up in the bedroom. The dust was so thick and it was everywhere. Just where does this dust all come from? My husband and I were discussing that while we buzzed around trying to get things looking halfway decent. I said that if it comes from humans; old skin cells, then why does an abandoned house have as much as a house that is lived in? We decided that it was pushed in from outside and left it at that. This morning I looked it up and lo and behold, we were right. I found an article that shows, indeed it comes from outside and some of it is not all that innocuous.

So maybe after reading this, I will clean more? Not.

A Housekeeper I am not

I have a love-hate relationship with housework. I hate doing it but love it when it’s done. I know that’s not that unusual; plenty of people are in this boat. I would rather have a maid but financial concerns do not allow that to happen. This morning after a series of mechanical problems thwarted our bike riding, I had to make a decision. Did I want to watch my husband fret over the brakes on the bike, or do I want clean sheets for the week and the availability of clean underwear? The clean won. It didn’t take a lot of time and before you knew it, the bikes were working again and out we went.

To me, and probably too many others, dust accumulates in the flattest of surfaces all too soon. When I do get in the mood to actually dust, a week later it looks just the same as it did before I dusted. Well not totally, but dust is there again, looming its ugly head up and proclaiming its appearance once again. I hate the dust. It makes me look like the bad housekeeper I am.
When I got married, I tried to impress my husband with my housekeeping abilities, such as they were. But I soon tired of all the show and eventually when he complained I said “if you don’t like it, do It yourself.” To which, he did! Now he is quite the housekeeper doing more vacuuming and cleaning than I do. I tend to leave everything to the last minute until the time I look around and see that the house resembles something out of a horror film and then decide that something has to be done and we can’t live like this any longer. I the speed around dusting, vacuuming, and straightening until things are somewhat shiny. My husband on the other hand takes his time and really makes things shine. That’s great for him, but I hate to do it and so I do the least amount that I can. I suppose I am a diva at heart.

But this morning the only thing that got done were the laundry and the dishes. Then we went out for a ride.