2 1/2 Hours of Country Music and Mopping.

The best part about having a blog is writing whatever I want. Hello Universe! Sometimes (like now) I have absolutely no idea what I want to write about but somehow I'm still typing away like a crazy person. It's very refreshing. Jack is sleeping, Lillie is coloring on the floor, Dustin is busy away painting an entire house some shade of off-white and fixing some lady's water heater. With all of this quiet and all of my rambling thoughts, I turn to my good friend: Mr. Blog.

Last night Dustin and I spent about 2 1/2 hours cleaning our room. Obviously this isn't our dream house. Obviously this isn't even our "I-guess-it'll-work" house. This house has it's benefits (awesome ward, crazy cheap rent, full manifestation of "love grows in small homes" theory) and also it's downfalls. While we technically have a sink that is held up by exposed 2x4's and plywood, and a slanted floor of 2-5% grade, we get by quite fine, actually.

So anyway, back to the story, another con to this house would be that there are no closets. Like, none. Actually, we have one closet that is underneath the stairway that goes up to the attic unit. Our nephew, Easton, nicknamed it the "Harry Potter closet." That tiny slanted closet has a lot of random scraps of different wall paper plastered to the walls and many layers of linoleum peaking out and smells exactly like you would expect a 90-year-old house to smell like--and is where we lock our kids up when they're naughty.
JUST KIDDING.
The only things that are naughty enough to have to live in there are Dustin's extension cords, some space heaters, and my cleaning chemicals (ironic).

So ANYWAY, we spent 2 1/2 hours cleaning our room because we don't have any closets, and we use our bedroom as one giant one for the entire house. It's stressful to even walk in there, or wake up in there. My reasoning that making our bed with lots of throw pillows will somehow mask the floors, dressers, nightmare under the bed, and stack of pictures that are bound to fall over hasn't really been working out. But at least our bed is made every day. Ok, I'll be honest. While we do have loads of old checkbooks, immunization records, past pay stubs, and Dustin's montage of Ceder Badge memorabilia in piles everywhere, 95% of that mess was made by me. I "apparently" have a bit of a problem with trying on clothes and throwing them on the floor. I also have a problem with trying on shoes and then throwing them on the floor. I also apparently drink too much Diet Shasta these days, and (you guessed it), throw the empty cans on the floor.

In my defense, the other 1100 sq/ft of our home is immaculate. I was a housekeeper for 3 years, afterall.

So, Dustin (who is the sweetest) helped me organize all my crap. We even moved all the furniture and swept and mopped underneath everything. We even wiped down all the baseboards. I'm not even going to tell you how many garbage bags we filled with garbage and DI stuff. But really, it's embarrassing. And I keep telling myself that if we had closets and storage space (or even a garage) that this would never happen. And Dustin smiles and says, "I know, Erika." and I know he's lying, and he knows I'm lying. BECAUSE OF HOW MANY BAGS WE FILLED.

So I made an itinerary of rooms to thoroughly clean for each night this week. I think starting school in 6 days will be much less stressful knowing that even the rods to our blinds are sanitized. There won't be any more secrets come Friday night. And I can't lie, you can't even being to imagine how much my innermost dreams have come true when I hear Dustin singing every word to every country song on 105.5 The Hawk while we clean. He even said last night, "The people who don't like country music haven't even given it a chance. I used to be one of those people."

(SUPER LOUD SIGH)

And really, I do love this house.