Clean the house

If you are having guests over for a holiday, such as Christmas or Easter you may have started to panic thinking it's time to get cleaning.

Or is it?

Why do we feel an incessant need to clean the house before guests arrive? We scrub, polish, and wipe surfaces to within an inch of their lives.

Why do we do it? Do we not want to be seen in a house that appears lived in? Are we embarrassed by the standards we are willing to accept?

I feel better when someone arrives without calling, then there is no stress about preparing the house and I can just relax and say, "If I knew you were coming I could have...." This takes the proverbial ball out of my court and puts it into their's thereby reducing any blame to me.

If you have your family over for dinner, these are the people who have grown up with you. If you are the child entertaining a parent then that parent remembers how you use to keep your room. Why change.

If you are a parent entertaining your grown children and their families, this is a good time to relate stories of how untidy they were as children.

No matter how clean your house is, it will never be clean enough for in-laws. Therefore your only solution is to hire a maid and blame her. This will be interpreted that you aren't a strict employer but you can say you were out sourcing the ingredients for the wonderful meal that you have prepared for them today, and as such you were not able to assess the maid's work using your strict criteria . Of course because you had hired the only maid who had recommendations, she was not available to speak as she was cleaning for other, high flying clients.

Sometimes no matter how hard you scrub, you can't remove a stain. Don't worry, we have strategies for this. If the stain happens to be last months takeaway and is in the center of a carpet~think occasional table or heavy trunk. A well placed table or trunk with either a decorative "featured" vase works well as does a small bronze-like statute. This has turned your stained area into a featured area where people will look with awe.

Or you could simply rearrange the furniture to cover the dreaded reminder. Be warned that guests may try to move your furniture. This will call for quick action on your part by throwing yourself onto the sofa as a way of anchoring it to the spot.

The trick for cleaning a bathroom is simple. Squirt bleach in the toilets, change towels and blame the rest on an inefficient plumber. Soap scum, can't be removed until the plumber repairs the shower head. Stains in the toilet, the plumber is waiting for the parts to arrive.