How To Clean Up Your House

Last year we bought a wonderful house. It’s in the middle of nowhere, meaning in the growing northern area of Bucharest, a zone which is still considered premium by every real estate agent. We bought it on inspiration, didn’t plan in advance to move to a new house. Just saw it, liked it, and in three weeks we were moved in.

It’s a rather big house. More than 200 square meters of built area and more than 100 square meters of yard. A little bit more for a family of three, they said. Little we listened to them, of course. We just liked the house, not to mention that it was the very first of house for me and for Diana. The fact that I moved into a real house after more than 35 years spent on apartments was like an epiphany to me.

Enthusiasm

The first two-three months were a continuous fairy tale. We bought furniture, installed appliances and enjoyed a beautiful fall in the back yard. Everything was fantastic. And still is, but…

This “but” started as a little annoyance and evolved in something I never thought to be so powerful. In fact, I never had this problem before, or to be more specific, it never was so clear.

To keep a long story short: we couldn’t cope with cleaning up the house. Yes, I know, seems lame, but that’s the truth. Coming from a 75 square meters apartment to a 200 + 100 square meters property was a huge change. The public status change of owning a house was great, of course, and so was the comfort boost, but it come with some hidden costs: the maintenance costs.

We started to realize that the moment we saw the first spiders web in places we didn’t frequent as much. Ooops, we have spiders! And then we saw the little dust piles in the corners. And then we realized we need two big garbage cans instead of one because we produced a lot more garbage. Subtly, everything started to gravitate around the dirt in our lives. We just had too much.

In the beginning, we cleaned the house every time we added some new furniture or some new appliance. But when the furniture was complete and all appliances installed, we just had to live that new life. And the house was literally too big for us. We were overwhelmed. (more…)