If Cleanliness is next to Godliness, I’m in trouble
Let me just say that I am not a clean freak. In fact, that is probably waaay understating things. I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a grungy person or think that I live in a cesspool or anything that extreme and you won’t ever see my house on an episode of “Hoarders”, but Mr. Clean and I aren’t exactly best buddies either. My problem is I find myself going to two very different extremes when it comes to house cleaning: either every single speck of dust has to be gone or I’m just not going to bother. That attitude coupled with the fact that I work full-time and have a 1 year old means that the later has been my general philosophy for most of my married life.
Anyone that has sold a house can tell you that the number one thing to get your house ready to sell is to clean and de-clutter like nobody’s business. The “staging professionals” hired by our realtor described it as “clean like your grandmother would clean.” I like to call it June Cleaver Clean. The kind of clean that no house, car, or office of mine has ever experienced before. That is the level of clean that a house should be in before putting it on the market.
Well, our house is on the market…and I’m still working on the clean part. I’m pretty good at getting rid of the junk in the house, probably more so now that I know we can’t take most of it with us anyway. We only have 2 trunks full of stuff that won’t be coming with us that we would like our families to store. Things like my wedding dress and nice china. However, getting rid of all of our junk took a lot longer than I would have thought, even for my house that I like to purge of junk every 6 months or so. Our basement was especially bad, as we never used it for anything other than a giant junk dump. Our garage and laundry room are still not what I would consider up to par, but they are getting close.
That being said, having a house free of junk does not make it June Cleaver Clean. That part came this last weekend, as I took to the bathrooms and wood floors with my arsenal of cleaning products and waged war on grimy corners and scummy walls. It was a long hard fight, but I was victorious! And where was Dan during the War on Grime? He was fighting the good fight at 50 feet below in Mermet Springs. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.
We are normal (well ok, not so normal) people that have a dream to see the world and live life as it was meant to be. We both have successful careers in the healthcare industry, even in this terrible economy. We want to break free of the current cycle of trading time for dollars and dollars for more and more things we don't need. So, we have decided to forego the fruits of our economic success and "retire" well before we are 30 and set out to see what is over the Horizon.