When it gets dirty, paint!

Holy cow.  I just figured it out.  This is so disturbing.

Okay, so for all of you out there who have small little-ins offsprings and a/some possible four-legged creature(s) running around your abode, there is a chance that there has come a time in your life that you looked around your house and said, “Why is everything so DIRTY in here?!” 

That is because you were remembering the times of old, those good old times, when things stayed clean.  For five minutes or more!  Sorry sucka, those days are long gone.  That is because those little-ins and that creature (or more) are bound and determined upon penalty of death that they are going to do their darnedest to wreck everything you have in the shortest amount of time possible like they’re going for the Guinness Book in some kind of mad wild eyeball panic streak. 

Awww, little-ins and creatures are so darling.

Yes, they are.  The little-ins, I mean.  I’ve told you about the creatures before.  Them, not so much.  For crying out sideways, DO NOT GET A DOG.  Just in case you missed it the first fifty times.  If you were looking for a sign from heaven to confirm, there it was.

Ahem.

So I pride myself on being ultra-tidy and minimalistic (sorta – not 100% like manvsdebt.com, but on the spectrum reaching toward him).  I love things in their place.  I love 90 degree angles and when there are lines on the carpets and lines in the grass (and obviously lines along the cement from edging).  I throw stuff out like I’m in a race to do so. 

But for the last year or so, I’ve been cleaning my heart out and my head off and every time I look around, I say, “But something is wrong! It’s just not the same!  What the heck is it?”  Then I would lament the sadness of it all and go get a piece of Trader Joe’s 72% dark chocolate (organic, of course) and sigh whilst eating it.

Today I found out what the thing was.

This is some kind of horror to admit.  I am a professional organizer.  I go in peeps houses and tear it up.  I clean like Martha Stewart is a slacker.  But no.  This has escaped me – until now.

The tops of the walls.

They’re all disgusting!  How did they get so gross?!  They’re like this grey, dirt, hazy, yuck sauce.  I am guessing it may have been from the eight years straight of burning candles, but that is just a guess.  I think I burned them for about 16 hours a day.  Yes.  Don’t do that.

I HATE candles now – with a passion!  Those rotten, stupid, disgusting horrors!  If I could, I’d…well…I’d, I’d BURN THEM!  No.  No, I wouldn’t.  Because that would just make them happy and cause more of the problem.

So I got up and started scrubbing.  Wild scrubbing.  Magic Eraser scrubbing.  Bleach scrubbing.  Trader Joe Lavender dish soap scrubbing.  All of the above scrubbing.  TO NO AVAIL.

This, quite frankly, makes me die.  A teensy bit, in my heart and in every way.  What to do.

Especially because my house looks like some weird smeary tragedy.

Gotta solve it. 

Paint!

Lots of paint.  That glorious horror!  The time-consuming, messy, falling-apartness of it all that results in something lovely that you want to stare blankly at for minutes at a time.

You haven’t seen me on here in the last few days because I have been in the midst of such a painting tornado.  Ultra bright white paint that makes it seem like I have installed different lighting in the house.  It is amazing.

But you know how it is when you paint, right?  You start on the trim around the doorway and it connects to the top trim and then the trim on the other side of the door, then that connects to trim on the ground…which connects to trim around a closet door.   Well, it’s sick. You just can’t stop.  I started off in the hallway and it ended up as me tearing up the offspring’s room completely and painting around every window, the closet trim, the baseboards and then quite considering if I ought to go out and buy some more paint and change the color of the room altogether.  (I haven’t.  Yet.)

My house is new.  (Mostly.  I’m still painting.)  I am covered in paint. But there is something wonderful about the result of the chaos: for five minutes (maybe more if I get lucky), I will return to the look of clean.

Back to it.

Peace, love and pass me that roller,

Ms. Daisy