Cleaning is not my favorite. Never has been. Never will be. I put it off at all costs. Of course, I have my regular chores. I do the dishes. I vacuum. I steam clean the floor. I even clean the shower. But the kitchen and the bathroom? I avoid cleaning either of them.

So today, I met those areas of un-comfort head on and I cleaned the bathroom and I steam cleaned the countertops and the stove in the kitchen. Really, one of the reasons that I chose this task today is that I figured that Ann deserves it. She has put up with all of my ridiculous uncomfortable tasks for almost three weeks now – I figured that she should get something out of it. And I totally know that none of this is that big of a deal to her – she goes on a cleaning binge on a weekly basis. But I figure that if one of my tasks can save her a couple of hours of cleaning and free her up to just hang out with the boys today – that’s good enough for me.

Once we got home from church today, I started cleaning. I cleaned one of the bathrooms (always an adventure when you have boys…). Then we had lunch. Then it was on to vacuuming the floors. And I even did a good job where I moved everything and used the wand to go around the edges and the window sills. Then it was time for the kitchen.

We redid our kitchen when we moved into our house, and we have quite a bit of countertop. And back when we did it, granite was seriously expensive so that was pretty much out of the question. So we went for tile. But, Ann and I never like to do anything normal when it comes to any kind of decorating, so instead of a normal tile countertop, we have little hexagonal tiles for our countertop. I love what they look like (though they were a serious pain to lay), but holy moly there is a LOT of grout. And none of the grout goes in straight lines.

So, steam cleaning it is a huge pain. You can’t just move the steam cleaner down the grout in a straight line. You have to do little circles to make sure that you get all of it. And like I said, we have a lot of countertops. So, I think I spent about 2 1/2  hours cleaning the countertop and the stove. Needless to say, it was not my favorite thing to do. I think my shoulders are going to be sore tomorrow from making all of those little circles. But, Ann was super glad to have shining-clean countertops and stove.

Takeaway:

Seriously, I don’t know how Ann gets all of the cleaning done. Things like this make me appreciate her even more. I hated cleaning the kitchen, but it’s just something that she does on a regular basis. She doesn’t complain (and I don’t think she likes it any more than I do). She just does it because it needs to be done. And there are a lot of areas that I need to be more like my beautiful wife and just get things done without complaint and without making it any kind of a big deal. I need to get it done just because it needs to get done.