We’re leaving on a house swap this Sunday.

A “what” you might ask?

A house swap.  It’s like a wife swap, but instead of giving my wife to a stranger in exchange for his wife, we just do the same with houses. 

If we were to have a house swap key party, we would throw all of our wives in a bowl and whichever wife you picked out, you got to go live in her house for two weeks with your family.

We’ve done this several times before with tremendous results.  This year we are exchanging with an Irish family.  So, for the next two weeks, we will go live in their home and drive their car and make lots of lucky charms jokes and they will come live in our house, drive our car and presumably make jokes about weak American beer and how much we seem to love chain restaurants.

Ah, the beauties of cross-cultural understanding.

(Fun Fact:  Did you know that Lucky Charms were first created when someone had the idea to mix Cheerios with Circus Peanuts?  It’s true!)

Anyway, we have truly loved our house swap experiences because without the expense of hotels and car rentals and having to eat in restaurants meal after meal, we have been able to travel to many places that we otherwise could never have afforded to take our family.  There is one downside though.

Cleaning.

Part of the house swap code is that you leave your home freshly cleaned and sparkling.  This is a very reasonable standard and one that you want the people on the other end to reciprocate, but the problem is this:  When someone comes to visit you at your home, you only have to clean part of it.  You have to clean the guest bedroom and the bathroom and the living room.  But, honestly, you can get by with leaving your own room as a dump and shoving whatever you want into the corner.

This is not the case with the house swap.  You have to clean everything!

So, we have spent the last couple of weeks doing crazy things like cleaning out closets and washing windows and organizing that stack of DVDs on top of the television. 

Things that rarely ever get done otherwise.

We are not an excessively messy people, but with three children, a couple of teenagers, a busy life (not to mention the blog!) we don’t really dedicate the hours necessary to keeping the house spotless.  We more aim for “picked up” and “vaguely sanitary.”

So, in this respect, the house swap is really good for us.  It forces us to get in there and do things that we tend to let slide otherwise.  I haven’t really cleaned out our kids closets since we moved into this house two years ago, but I did last week.  I pulled out everything inside the closets and sorted and organized.  We hauled stuff to Goodwill, we put things in their proper place and we recycled enough plastic McDonald’s toys to build a new (albeit fairly tacky) prius.

This also forces us to do some of that deep down cleaning that is normally just done with a quick scrub.  For instance, we actually hired a company to come out and clean the carpets.

Wow.

I had forgotten they were that white.

I’m not sure who’s brilliant idea it was to put white carpet in a house with three children.  (Especially in the dining room.  Seriously.  White carpet under a high chair?)  So it was nice to see the carpet restored to its former glory. 

We have also spent more time scrubbing (and I do mean scrubbing – as in down on our hands and knees like Cinderella) the shower and bathrooms like rarely gets done.  Sure, we spray on some of that scrubbing bubbles stuff and give it the once over with an old rag, but rarely do we break out those chemicals that make you feel lightheaded and really spend some time scouring and killing brain cells.

Boy, I may be a little stupider now, but that shower floor sure does shine. 

You might be thinking to yourself, my, this seems like a lot of work.

And yes, it does.

It is a tremendous amount of work and it comes at a time when you’re already busy with stuff like packing for a two week trip to a foreign country, but it has two extraordinary benefits and I’ll tell you what they are:

1)  It forces us to actually clean our house.  I’ll be honest.  Our life tends to run on a “needs to happen” basis.  Sure, we keep the house decently clean and picked up, but some things only get cleaned when we know that someone is coming to see them.  (Maybe, I should just pay someone to come in each week and look shamefully at each room of our house).  So this forces us to do that annual top to bottom spring cleaning that would probably never happen otherwise.

2)  We come home to a clean home.  I don’t know about you, but if we’re just heading out for the weekend to visit family, the house usually looks worse than usual upon return.  The scramble to get packed and out the door leaves a wake of chaos behind it and we usually return to stacks of paper on the table, a cereal bowl we forgot to wash in the sink and clothes strewn everywhere as we were stuffing clothes into a suitcase at the last minute.

But with the house swap, we leave the house immaculate and when we return, we come home, exhausted from a 10 hour plane trip with fussy kids, to a home that is clean, organized and sparkles – all ready for us to sink in and mess it up again.

Because that’s what our family life is.  It is comfortable and chaotic and joyous, but it’s also a little messy.  And that’s ok.  There are only so many hours in the day and I am ok with the fact that we spend less time cleaning so that we can spend more time at the zoo or reading a book or going for a swim.  But, that being said, It sure is nice to come home to a clean house every once in a while.

And I wouldn’t trade that for all the pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars and green clovers in the world.

It’s magically delicious!

Note:  I’ll be on vacation for the next two weeks, but I hope to post a few blogs along the way, as long as we have easy internet access.  So keep checking back here, and if I end up taking a total break while I’m gone, don’t worry, I’ll have a full helping of stories about the emerald isles when I return.  Happy Summer!