Clean.

Three times now, in the past four months or so, I have hired a professional to clean my apartment.  The idea started innocently enough.  It was late April, or maybe early May, and the "spring cleaning bug" was running rampant in my veins.  I'd scrubbed my apartment top to bottom, working my way from room to room. I had purged a few bags of donated items, I'd done pile after pile of laundry.  But I still felt like there was more that could be done, more that could be cleaned.  Maybe it's an aftereffect of the long winters that force our windows and doors shut for so dreadfully long but I was desperate for a deep clean.  Basically I decided that I wanted to find a way to power wash my entire apartment; to rid it of all the dust and grime that old apartments in the city are never truly rid of, particularly in a city as old as Boston.

So, thanks to a very well timed, excellently discounted deal plus an additional coupon I found online, I decided to hire a cleaning service.  Living on the edge, I tell you!
 
Growing up it never would have even crossed my mind to imagine a cleaning service at our house in New Jersey.  Honestly, as I reflect back on it now, I'm pretty sure I didn't even know such services existed.  (It's not like we were the one house on our street not having the maids come on a regular basis, lets put it that way.)  No, the closest I had come to any sort of cleaning service prior to my recent indulgence was years before, when I would go home with my then boyfriend to visit his parents in suburbia. He and I would occasionally be in his parents house at the same time when the two cleaning women his mother had hired arrived.  They were very pleasant, went about their business with gracious and polite nods and smiles, but I honestly didn't think too much about them, their hiring, or, truthfully, the luxury of their visits. Then boyfriend's Mom had a bad back and she couldn't keep up with the seemingly never ending chores around the house, particularly all the floor mopping, vacuuming, and sweeping.  In that situation, those two women who arrived how ever often they arrived just felt like a constant, a set expense as reliable as putting gas in ones car or running to the grocery store each week.

Seeing, again, as the whole concept of people arriving at a scheduled time to clean your house while you do not lift a finger is so foreign to me I had kind of a hard time during my own cleaning crew's first visit this spring.  (I grew up shoveling manure in my horse's barn for crying out loud.)  The two women went about their business as they moved through my apartment, starting with the bathroom.  Meanwhile, I put myself to "work" changing my sheets before the moved into my bedroom to clean, I gathered up trash and recycling to carry downstairs.  Finally one of them smiled and reminded me that "I could just relax.  They would handle it." 

Oh. Right. Okay. (But still.  Weird.)

When they left, I have to admit, it did feel like I had just allowed myself to partake in a ridiculous indulgence.  What fun to walk through my clean, sparkling, dust free apartment and to not have had to deal with the actual scrubbing, dusting, vacuuming, etc. that are necessary to create the end result of a clean home.  Hmm.  Maybe this whole cleaning service thing isn't such a terrible idea, after all... 

As it happens, I have been extremely crafty at digging up more coupons and great deals for this same cleaning service and I've managed to have them return twice more for another amazingly cheap deal.  This summer has been easier to let them do their thing when they arrive (versus decided I too should pitch in with the chores around here!) as I busy myself on my back porch, watering my plants or thumbing through a magazine while they work their magic.

(Ha!  Thumbing through a magazine while someone else mops my kitchen floor.  Imagine that.)

(If there is one chore I hate above all in my apartment it is mopping my impossible to get clean kitchen floor.)

I don't imagine it will ever feel normal to me to hang around while someone else does all of the chores - scrubbing the bathtub, dealing with the endless amounts of cat hair, mopping (ugh mopping) - but I have to admit, it is a nice feeling when they leave to know that in two hours they banged out all of those nagging chores and suddenly my free time is just that.  Utterly and completely free to do with what I will.  Chores?  Over and done with.  Given my schedule and full days that's what this cleaning service luxury has come down to for me as of late.  Our summers in New England last but a brief, brief time and I am determined to soak up every minute of them that I can.  Perhaps I'll go back to cleaning all on my own this winter; for it can be therapeutic.  For now though, I think I'll milk these deals I find as long as possible.  Let's consider it my summer break.  From house work.