Why Clean?

It's time to start the 31 Days to Clean Homemakers Challenge and the girls have us asking ourselves... Why clean? 

So why do I want a clean house?

I started thinking about my house, the state it's in now.  I thought about what it is for my family and what it should be.

When we bought this house 3 years ago it was a foreclosure. The walls were dirty, the carpet had been ripped up and the stained concrete slab was all that was left, the doors were drawn all over and covered in stickers and everything reeked of horrible 70s decor.  Oh you should have seen some of the light fixtures and the kitchen cabinets... wow.

But we had high hopes.  We scooped it up and dove right in, ready to make it ours.  Our first home.

We scraped the popcorn ceiling, knocked down walls, painted, put down real maple floors (that were ripped up within a year thanks to the boys flooding the house!) and installed new light fixtures and hardware and we did it all ourselves.

But before long we ran out of money and energy and instead of completing tasks on our to do list we started settling for things the way they were.

 I like to decorate my kitchen with a hunky guy cooking breakfast

Three years later we have a million unfinished projects.  We knocked down walls but didn't finish trimming them.  We pulled up the baseboards and installed our new flooring (twice) but didn't put the baseboards back down.  When we painted we didn't cut in the edges because we knew we were going to install crown molding but then never got to it.

It's a mess.  No matter how clean I keep it, it still looks like a mess.

So I stopped trying.  Stopped cleaning.  Let the mess take over.

So why clean now?

We've all started to hate this place.

I noticed that when the kids come home from school they beg to go somewhere. When I go to the grocery store I cringe at the thought of going home. When Mike has the day off the last place he wants to be is in that house.

It makes me sad.

We've lost our haven, our refuge, our home and all we have left is a shelter.

So I guess that's my answer.

I'm cleaning to restore that place of peace for my family.

And that's definitely worth a little bit of elbow grease huh?