Five Things on Friday - Clean Hate Edition

Brynna is having a sleepover next weekend for her seventh birthday. In addition to the fact that my baby is turning seven and how-in-the-holy-pants-did-that-happen, I am willingly allowing a couple of "tween" girls into my home to stay overnight. Since I have a smallish house and all, this means I have to clean the whole darn thing except for the basement. You know, I'd like to beat them with a dowel rod for even looking in my bedroom door, but I think that would make me a bad hostess.

In any case, this weekend, the clean sweep of doom begins. I am going to work my way through the entire house, cleaning everything in my path and making the whole house look like the seven dwarves' house post Snow White, rather than pre Snow White. If you know what I mean. (If you don't, you may want to work on your Disney trivia and/or have rugrats of your own.

Ceiling to floor cleaning is not my favorite activity, mostly because it's so intensive as to make my head roll around on my shoulders in agony. But now it's even worse, because there is no one else to force into all the jobs I hate. With no further babbling I bring you:

This is not me. This is not even close to me.

Five Things I Absolutely Loathe to Clean

1. Floors - There is no job I hate worse than cleaning the floors and it doesn't even matter what kind of floors we are talking about. I hate sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, dust mopping and scrubbing with a toothbrush. I hate carpet cleaning. I have one of those ridiculously overpriced Hoover Floormates (a.k.a. the $100 mop) and I hate it too. I don't know why. I love clean floors, I just hate all the methods of getting there. No, I take it back, I know why. It's because I learned to sweep outside on the sidewalk. And to this day, I can't figure out why you can't just shove everything off the edge of the floor. Why?

2. Windows - I typically don't even bother. No one looks at my windows anyway. However, I have stupid little cat nose prints all over my windows because I have this one dumb cat who refuses to walk outside the door, but longs to go there. At least, so he would have you believe with his face pressing mania. I also hate the smell of Windex, the fact that the windows will smear and streak no matter what I do and the feeling like an idiot that can only occur when you clean something that is covered by curtains 365 days a year. Because I'm that person - the one who never opens my curtains.

3. Appliances - I have all white appliances, which means they appear to be dirty five minutes after cleaning. Also, they are nearly impossible to clean because every little hair or speck of lint on your rag/sponge/whatever will end up stuck to the side somewhere.

4. Tub - Most people hate the toilet. To those people I say, "Whatever, at least you have a little wandy thing to stick down in there. You don't have to climb in the toilet. You totally have to climb in the tub. And even then you are probably going to miss something. Or your kids will come home covered in mud and make you do it over again. Or the cats will decide that this is a nice place to play. Or something. There will be blood if you mess up my clean tub.

5. Under the Couch - I don't know if everyone's under-couch is the magnet that ours are, but they are positively disgusting under there. And I'd like to just ignore it (like I usually do) but I can't, because inevitably once the floor is clean, things will start sticking out from under there. A book. A few sheets of paper. A ridiculously squashed shoe. A cat toy. A pacifier from when Brynna was a baby. Halloween candy. A baseball bat. I spend most of this time saying things like, "Where did that come from? Come on! I did this like two months ago, and I haven't seen that for seven years! I didn't even know we owned a baseball bat." It's like a magical place where objects breed and spawn other weird objects. Perhaps one day it'll just suck me in.

Pray it's not this weekend. And commiserate. What do you hate to clean?