Is it too much to ask for a house that is easy to clean? 

I have been busy cleaning all this week for a studio tour and I am starting to understand the pull of the Dream Home. Yes, I own my home (along with the bank) but it has these knurled faucets that hide the grungy bits and rough wood trim that never gets clean, cheap carpet and flocked wallpaper. I keep thinking, I want modern, sleek and unfussy, with no crevices, niches or decorative flourishes that hide dirt. I want to redo the whole house so I just get the damn thing clean!  

It’s worse - far, far worse! - to rent a house or apartment and try to get it clean. You have the years, decades and maybe centuries of ground-in sludge from generations of dirty humans who left pounds of skin cells there in the crevices for you to scrape out. A rental is usually uncleanable, because you can’t do demolition - leaving the baseboards (god, I hate cleaning baseboards!) with their 15 layers of old lead-based paint on the trash heap, the cabinets, with their dark recesses reeking of cockroaches,  on the roadside, or windows with dried, cracked glazing and dingy paint-covered glass panes on craigslist. I’ve been known to clean a rental thoroughly, only twice - when I move in and then when I move out.  I have been known to paint over the greasy sludge on the baseboards. Painting hides a multitude of sins, but cleaning up after other people gives me the creeps. 

So it makes sense that people (read: women) want a brand new house, with no one else’s bad choices and laziness to contend with. This impulse alone explains the housing boom, the equivalent of buying a new car when your old one has a dirty ashtray. Even I have daydreams about building my own, even though I will never have the wherewithal to do that. Not that modern houses are all that easy to clean anymore, what with the shoddy Chinese materials that mold and melt away in a few months. But at least you have a clean house for those few precious months. 

Please don’t think that I am a clean freak; far from it. I grew up in a well-off household. In other words, we had maids to do the dirty work. I have never cleaned a house under the tutelage of an experienced cleaner - my socialite mother was certainly no housekeeper. So now I clean my house about once a quarter, if left to my own devices. If I have visitors, I clean more frequently, and sometimes I purposely invite people over so I can get the house clean. Even though nobody showed up for the studio tour today, I don’t care - my house is lovely! Quick! Come and visit!

But it took the whole week to get it presentable. Part of cleaning for me is re-arranging everything - furniture, cupboards, closets. I clean so seldom that re-fung-shwaying the house makes me feel like the effort is worth it - I have something to show for my time. Just cleaning isn’t it’s own reward; It just gets dirty again. 

And then there’s the struggle with the cleaning implements. I have 3 vacuums; It takes three to do the job. A hand vac for the baseboards and cobwebs, a stick vacuum (basically a dust-buster with a handle) for the tile floors and an upright for the rugs and the one carpeted room. There is no overlap - and no vacuum is good for all three jobs. In fact, I’m thinking of getting a fourth - a canister for the stairs. The only vacuum that has the power to clean the heavy-traffic, cat-hair-embedded, cheap-carpeted stairs is the upright, but it’s too heavy and unwieldy to use on my stairs. I need to add a new closet just to house my vacuums.

My upright vacuum is the most expensive and most powerful machine I have for cleaning, but it is designed by a moron. The stuff it picks up has to take a hairpin turn from the hose to the filter, and the filter bin is tiny. It regularly jams up and it takes me an hour to pick out the wadded filth from the jammed bin with chopsticks. I get up-close and personal with those dust mites and dander (heard with a Scottish accent). Eeuuuww! It would probably be healthier to just sweep it all up with a broom, or  - getting right down to it -  just leaving the dirt in the carpet. 

I am probably a candidate for a $400 vacuum anyway. I have long hair and I shed. My cat has long hair and she sheds. And I use pounds of wool fibers in my work, all of which means I have prodigious dust bunnies. I don’t think even James Dyson can keep up with me. 

Don’t get me started on mops. I am a Swiffer women now; that company should be sued for single-handedly destroying the environment, they create so much landfill waste. But realistically, no mop is any better. Even if you have a simple sponge or rag mop, the refills are proprietary and they change the fittings constantly, so you can never find a replacement head that fits. You think the computer industry can’t agree on standards, the cleaning industry is far worse. 

The only cleaning implement that I feel good about is my broom. It’s handmade by a craftsman in my local guild, it’s made from local found-wood and when it wears out , the maker will put new broomstraw on the handle for a nominal fee.  

The old ways are best.