Clean Week. Day 3. The Stairs.

We've lived in this house for a year in a half now (the longest amount of time we've lived in any one place- we have a bad habit of hating where we live), and in that time, we have never cleaned the stairs. I think I went over them with the Swiffer wet jet once, which is kind of cleaning it, in a lazy attempt to get off whatever was spilt on the the third from the top step 8 months ago, so I knew it was time to get down on my hands and knees (3 days into clean week, my knees are killing me), fill up the mop bucket with a lemon scented throat burning liquid hell, grab a hand towel (I don't have any nice ones, thanks to Christopher's mechanic hands coming in and ruining them. All of them!), and show those wooden stairs who's boss!


As you can see, I hated it. I hated how the cloth got cold in between bucket dunks, I hated how I started seeing twinkling purple colored (and dancing) lemons out of the corners of my eyes due to the intoxicating (and not the good kind of intoxication) citrus aroma, and I especially hated scrubbing with my fingernails down into the creases of the wood, scraping out what can only be described as dirt from the planet Mars. I'm almost positive that most of the mess was probably here from before we moved in, because there is no way that I've ever taken a tube of toothpaste and squeezed it along side the molding while shaking cat hair from a burlap sack so that it could rain down and stuck to the surprisingly clingy baking soda solution. But- I don't know, maybe I did? Anything is possible at this point of my motherly insanity.

Clean week, day 3, the stairs ARE DONE! And they look great. I'm tempted to do my entire downstairs like that, on my hands and knees with the hell bucket. Think I could do it?

On a completely unrelated note: Today is Veterans Day, for those of you who might be living in a cave, reading my blog on your cell phone that only has one bar of signal. Take a minute to give some thanks? We're going down to the air park here on base with the kids in a little bit. And then later coming back to clean some things upstairs.

If you've done some cleaning of your own, taken before and after pictures, and want to help motivate the rest of us (y'all were slacking yesterday), link up!!