While we were in Baltimore this weekend, my little brother and his wife and kids stayed at our house to watch the animals and have a (ultra-cheap) mini-getaway of their own. It saved us the expense and hassle of boarding the dogs—and was much more fun for the dogs, too.
Apparently, the had a terrible fear that they (with their 9-month old and 21-month old and their own three dogs) would create such a havoc in our house that we’d come home and be horrified at their treatment of our castle. (Anyone who knows us and has seen our house is laughing really hard by now.) We left the house pretty clean - we even left clean sheets and towels all ready to go - and they were determined to leave the house in, if anything, even better condition than they found it.
Not that we don’t appreciate this, you understand, but we sure as heck didn’t expect it. I expected that the house would show a few days of dirt and traffic, but their own house isn’t exactly a cesspool, so I wasn’t worried. (Maybe I should have been.)
They cleaned. From what I hear, they cleaned constantly. They washed our (brand new, never even used once) placemats. Unfortunately, they only washed two of the four placemats, and we now have two somewhat smaller, wrinked placemats and two slightly larger, smooth and pristine placemats. That’s okay, since they were something like three dollars apiece at Target, but funny - who washes placemats that have never even been used?
They also mopped our (almost new, solid cherry, polyurethane finished) floors. This we expected, of course - five dogs and at least one good rainstorm, and some mopping is absolutely necessary. What we expected, though was a damp mop or the Swiffer Wet-Jet or, if they were feeling really motivated, the electric floor cleaner.
We weren’t expecting that they would dig out the nearly forgotten bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap and use that on our floors. Did you know that (despite what the Murphy’s people will tell you), Oil Soap leaves a really nasty residue on polyurethene-finished floors? Oh, yes it does. And it attracts dirt like a magnet. One walk through my house and my feet were absolutely filthy—the whole floor felt greasy.
You know that I can’t possibly be upset when they were so obviously working hard to do everything right and leave us with a sparkling house—but boy, I’ve mopped more in one day now than I did in the last month all put together. I think I have the floors almost clean.