If Susan Cleans the House

Our friends Ross and Zodda are arriving this afternoon for a weekend visit, which meant last night's plan was to prep the house for their arrival. We have house guests fairly often so I've sort of developed a system to work my way around the house cleaning and organizing, as necessary. That was the plan. Plans change. Mine did last night.

I started upstairs by pulling the sheets off our bed, grabbing the towels from both our bathroom and the guest bathroom and then pulled the sheets off the guest bed. I set them all in a pile by the stairs so I could take them down to the washer when I went downstairs. From there, I cleaned our bathroom and the guest bathroom - I was on a roll! I then went into the guest bedroom to straighten it up. I was getting ready to move downstairs to throw the laundry in the washer, pick up Rooney's toys and dust all of the furniture when I realized that I hadn't remade our bed. This is where my night took it's turn from cleaning. All because I wanted to make my bed. It makes me think of the story If you Give a Mouse a Cookie.

My sister, Jen, once pointed out how much she and I are like that mouse. And here's how my version went last night ...

If Susan Cleans the House

If Susan cleans the house, she's going to want to make the bed.

When she makes the bed she realizes that she hasn't washed her duvet in a long time. 

When she takes her duvet off the comforter there's dark gray lint (the color of our duvet) in every crease.

When she sees the lint, she's going to want to get it out.

She gets an idea to throw it in the dryer, which reminds her she still needs to take the original pile of sheets to the washer.

She goes down to the basement, puts everything in the machines and then realizes it's time for dinner.

When she goes upstairs to start dinner, she sees her used-to-be-nice-but-is-now-torn-to-shreds-by-Rooney West Elm chair in the sunroom, and decides it's finally time to fix it.

Before Rooney

After

She gets the scissors out, sits down and starts trimming when the garage door opens (hubby's home from the gym!) and once again she remembers she's supposed to be making dinner.

She runs into the kitchen, throws a bag of Spanish rice on the counter to make it look like she's getting ready to cook, and then sits back down to her chair project.

When hubby gets out of the shower she scrambles back into the kitchen and throws a TJ's burrito (argh, not getting much better at making real dinners!) into the microwave and sweetly asks him to finish everything up while she finishes the chair.

My work paid off - good as new!

They eat dinner with the NCAA tournament games playing in the background and of course she gets very distracted by the close games.

After dinner she sits down to watch the end of the games and grabs the laptop to see how her bracket is holding up.

When she opens the laptop she remembers that she still has blogs to catch up on so she opens Google Reader and gets started.

Once UConn beats SDSU (victory!), she remembers that she was checking her bracket and looks at the standings waaaay too long (because in the end she knows she won't win).

Hubby switches to HGTV for a second and lil Suzy remembers she was reading all her fave home design blogs.

She goes back to the blogs and then decides she wants to write something on her own.

To start her post, she'll need to upload pictures from her phone, so she starts doing that when she hears the dryer buzzer (oh yeah, laundry!).

She runs downstairs to check the comforter, but there's still lint everywhere - time for Plan B.

She starts picking out the lint one section at a time and realizes that it will take her until at least 5am using this method, and quickly comes up with an idea - Plan C.

She goes to get the vacuum from Rooney's bathroom/storage space and steps on a piece of litter, which will make her want to vacuum the bathroom.

She'll vacuum that room, then move to the main room of the basement and vacuum that entire space.

At that point, the comforter catches her eye and she moves back to that.

She lays it out on the ground and vacuums every crevice of the comforter using the hand tool.

Before vacuuming

After vacuuming

Once she's done, she comes back upstairs to get back to blogging and decides to blog about how she cleans when guests come to visit.

When she writes the part about cleaning the main level, she realizes she never got that far because she started making the bed. That of course makes her realize she STILL needs to finish making her bed.

At that point, she quits writing to go upstairs and make her bed, right before unmaking it to crawl in and go to sleep!

The End ... sort of

The last part didn't really go down that quickly. I went up to make the bed and Rooney started playing under the covers. I started taking pictures.

Jesse came upstairs with a screwdriver and starting trying to fix our door so Rooney can't push his way in at night. 

Ugh! 

I washed up. Took more pictures of Rooney.

Jesse continued to work on the door. 

I uploaded all of my new pictures to Flickr. And we finally went to bed at 1:15!

P.S. I never cleaned the main level - they're boys. I'm sure they won't notice!

P.P.S. I obviously didn't finish posting last night, so I'm scrambling to get this posted before I start working today. I spent way too much time working on this not to post it!

Rock Chalk Jayhawk and Happy Friday! :)