The neat versus clean debate

I am about to be a homeowner, an exciting (and recently, a scary seeming prospect). I have advanced into the adult world and am HIRING movers. In my mind this is a luxury item and I am excited. I am packing my own stuff and unpacking it (I am way too anal retentive and possessive to let anyone else touch my stuff), but someone else gets to grunt through the actual moving of the boxes.

The plan is to move into this new house by myself, but eventually Wonder Boy will be joining me there. We have our differences and the combining of households will be interesting. I am sure there are glitches we will run into. The one I think will be most interesting pertains to our cleaning styles. I am not a clean person. I am neat, though. My closets are often organized by color, my CDs in alphabetical order and my book categorized by genre. But ask me the last time I dusted and I probably won’t know the answer.

As far as I can tell, this quality of neat but not clean applies to my sisters as well. And we have all found our own Wonder Boy who is clean. Maybe even fanatically clean? I mean clean behind and underneath the stove and refrigerator clean. Why would I ever do that?

Packing has been oddly fun for me. It’s like a big challenge posed to me in How Organized Can You Be? The answer: very. I have printed labels for boxed that specify the room and have space for me to detail the contents of each box. Then, as if the labeling weren’t enough, I have designated my dining room as the staging area for boxes and they are organized into stacks based on the rooms they will go into in my new house. And then in another room I have furniture all stacked up and in yet another room, things I want to move myself.

In moving things around, all the while feeling very proud of myself for being so damn neat, I keep seeing two-year-old dust gathered on baseboards and shelves. (Two years being the length of time I have lived in this apartment.) In an attempt to let Wonder Boy live under the guise that just maybe I really am clean, I have been trying to follow up after myself and dust and sweep. I figure he has the rest of our lives to learn that dusting is an annual event.

Right?

This post originally appeared on Kate’s Point of View. © Kate. All rights reserved.