I Choose NOT to Clean Today

The Ask a House Cleaner Show and Podcast with Angela Brown

I choose not to clean today because of a family emergency and some weird stuff happening in my personal life. Even the hubby skipped cleaning the shower walls.

I choose not to clean today because of a family emergency and some weird stuff happening in my personal life. Even the hubby skipped cleaning the shower walls. And he said he made the bed, but really? It doesn’t pass.

Listen: I Choose NOT to Clean Today

Watch: I Choose NOT to Clean Today

Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.

I Chose Not to Clean Today

I choose not to clean today. And you say, “What? Angela choosing not to clean today? What’s up with that?” Today’s an unusual day in my house because everyone in my house runs off systems, almost in an automated fashion. And I get up several hours before my husband gets up. So he’s the last one out of the bed in the morning and the last one out of the shower.

So part of his morning routine is he gets to make the bed and he did today. In all fairness to him, he did today, but by anyone’s standard, it does not pass inspection. And my husband being OCD, you know something’s wrong when you see a made bed and it looks like that.

So on his way out the door this morning, he shouts to me and says, “I choose not to squeegee the shower walls on my way out of the shower today.” Now today’s an unusual day like I said, we just had a member of the family pass away. We have a different unrelated family member in the emergency room this morning.

We Made a Conscious Decision to Skip Chores

And I have a bunch of employee challenges going on this morning. So there’s like mad chaos in my house with family, friends, employees, and issues. So there’s a lot of stuff going on. So when my husband said this to me, “I choose not to squeegee the shower walls.”

I said, “No worries. I choose to skip the laundry, the dishes, and the bathrooms today.” So in our household today, we made a conscious choice to skip the chores. And what is the fallout of that?

What happens if you don’t clean the house for the day? What the reality is, we clean the house every day. It’s part of our daily routines and part of our lifestyle. And everyone in our household is part of the community and everyone contributes in their own way, based on what they do in the house and the things that they use.

Sometimes Things are More Important Than Cleaning

So everyone has their own routines that all work well together to keep our house a happy home. So today, where there were conscious decisions made by everyone, we choose not to clean today.

What we were saying was, there are higher priorities in our lives today that are taking precedence over our cleaning chores. So we choose not to clean today. Now, nothing bad happens. Okay. Our house is pretty tidy. We’ll come back tomorrow. If tomorrow is a better day, we pick up where we left off yesterday and we do all those chores.

So it’s not like our house is now in shambles because we skipped a day of squeegeeing the showers or something. Worst case scenario. We have little beads that bead up on the shower walls and, “Ugh. Oh no.” We wash them tomorrow.

Not Cleaning for a Day Isn’t the End of the World

It’s not the end of the world. My point is this, cleaning on a day-to-day basis and having routines that you follow is a conscious choice. And if you don’t make a conscious choice to live in a clean home, you are unconsciously making a choice not to.

So every day that you live in a clean home, it is a conscious choice. You chose to live in a clean home. And when you don’t make a choice, you are unconsciously choosing not to. And so I just want to stop for a second and say, it’s not the end of the world if you should have higher priorities for the day.

And as you continue with your life, it’s going to happen. You will have days where you’re like, “Ugh, no way can I go in and do a load of laundry and wash a couple of dishes and do the normal routine.”

Pick Up the Next Day in Your Routine

You’re out of routine. You’re out of sync. But if that is your normal process every day, then on the days where you have to make that judgment call, no worries. You pick up tomorrow where you left off.