What is a "clean house" anyway?

A friend of mine recently posted a link to a story on a parenting blog pointing out that everybody should just stop apologizing for the state that their house is in, because EVERYBODY'S house is like that, and, even if their house isn't, they don't care. Which I think is good advice.

But there ARE distinctions.

So I've been thinking about what having a "clean" house means to me.

First, there's safety. There ought to be no towers of heavy objects higher than one's head. No inflammable items touching heat sources like radiators or stoves (we actually DID have a fire once partially because of old pizza boxes on a stove...) No hazardous chemicals where a person, or pet, is likely to accidentally expose themselves to them. No sharp objects in places where a person will grab for something else and slice themselves on it. There should be pathways through the house that are free from things people would slip on or trip over.

There should be no rotting organic matter that could breed disease, and nothing that is likely to cause structural damage to the building (such as dripping liquids that could cause the structure to rot and weaken).

There may be a few other things, but that's basically it. Step one is to clean up hazards. And that's the base level of what's necessary. If your house isn't going to kill you or anyone else, you're not going to end up on one of those television shows.

Even at my worst, I'm usually good at this. Keeping all the slip-and-fall things off the ground, I'm not always so good at -- I've had my feet go out from under me after stepping on a dryer sheet a couple times. But, mostly, my house is safe.

So, after that, what's the level of cleanliness to aim for? The whole "impressing the neighbors" thing is just NOT going to happen. Not for me, not for at LEAST four-fifths of my friends. A handful of them can manage Better Homes and Gardens level decoration, and enjoy doing so, and good for them. But it's not what I'm going to manage. I'm not going to have things like matching chairs or bookcases that are all the same height or color. To the extent that Lis and I have ever had matching furniture, it's because we bought a bunch of cheap unfinished wood stuff and never bothered to finish it. So we've got a lot of matching unpainted bare wood stuff, I guess. But that's not a problem; that's not what I'm going to aim for.

So what AM I going to aim for?

You familiar with Steven Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People"? Not being a highly effective person myself, I don't remember all of them, but I remember one -- "sharpen the saw." If you're faced with a big pile of wood to saw, and a limited time to do it, you'd be tempted to jump right in and start -- but you're better off checking out your tools first, and spending some time bringing them to good condition if they need it.

I think that anybody who's worked with programmers and engineers is aware that this can be taken TOO far: left to their own devices, an engineer will spend far more time designing and implementing a tool to do a job than it would have taken to just do the job in a simpler manner. (Because, y'know, what if someone ever has to do the job again? They'll be able to just use this tool that I already designed!) But it's still generally true -- and MOST of the time, it's worth it to let the engineer design or tweak the tool first, anyway.

A house is a tool, and some forms of tidying and cleaning count as "sharpening the saw."

On Sunday, Lis sent me a link to an article called Homemade soft pretzels are easy to bake. Here's how. Because she thought I'd find it interesting, and we both like soft pretzels.

So I looked at it. And I thought it was interesting.

And -- here's the thing. I'd spent the previous week getting the kitchen together. And I looked at the recipe, and I realized that, not only did I have all the ingredients to make pretzels, I had easy access to the equipment and plenty of clean space to do the work.

So I made pretzels. And it was easy. Because the space was set up to MAKE it easy.

It would have been many times harder, taken at least twice as long, and been many times more annoying to do had the counters been as cluttered and sticky as they had been previously. But as it was, it was easy, and it was even easy to clean up after.

And I think THAT is what I want to aim for with cleaning. I want to clean such that the effort I spend cleaning is less than the effort I save in having to work around stuff. I want my stuff to be so organized that it makes things easy to do, but NOT so organized that it's a pain to keep it organized.

My goal is to work exactly hard enough to do all the stuff I want to do with the absolute minimum effort and stress. THAT'S how clean I want my house. Exactly so clean that, any messier, and things would take more effort to do, but that making it cleaner wouldn't make anything easier.

It's not going to be easy. It's going to be difficult to get everything to be easy. But it is to be hoped that it will end UP easier.