I currently have cleaners in for the second day "deep cleaning" my house (a tiny 2 bed, 1-1/2 bath townhouse); took them 4 hours yesterday to get the nicotine off the walls, ceiling, surfaces of my husband's smoking porch. They wash the walls, I only had them do the stove and microwave in the kitchen as the other appliances are "new" (refrigerator and dishwasher) and they got the stove looking better than when we moved in here 7 years ago. Bleach in the bathrooms and all the gunk from behind the toilets where I can't get; it's heaven!

No, I don't do the cleaning either; I moved here because it was so much smaller and "easier" than my old home but can't get down on my knees anymore, bend for very long, or have the energy for the harder stuff (have almost died the last 2-3 days just sorting, trashing, moving everything out of their way and into my car so they just had to clean, not move stuff around but now I have to move it all back in the next couple days; I'm getting tired just thinking about it). I only do an occasional vacuum job and toilet clean (when I have guests coming) and make sure the area where food is prepared is clean.

I made a "game" with a piece of poster board, pictures from magazines, numbers and a game dice (that had 8 sides/numbers) and did pictures of 8 "areas" of housework I wanted to do like "cats", "kitchen", "bathrooms", "filing", "general upkeep", "vacuuming", etc. and threw in a "free" day off and a "dollar store" one where I had to go out to the dollar store and buy only 1 item, bring it home and use it :-) Every morning, first thing, I'd roll the die/dice and have to work for 30 minutes on whatever number I rolled; the areas of the poster board depicting scenes about each "area" and a large, colorful, stick-on number told me that area's number (and they were all over the board in random sections to make it a little more interesting to find what the number meant. But it was kind of nice, too, having a collage of nice looking kitchens from magazines (so I could daydream of turning mine into that :-) or cats and kitty litter, etc., took me several hours to make the board (I still have it).

After a week or two of being faithful to it I started to feel "silly" like I was a kid who needed an adult to tell me what to do. I could "think" what I wanted to do for 30 minutes and work on it, theoretically, but, after I quit using the board, my doing the work petered out too. I do remember my therapist's words though, "No one likes to clean bathrooms!" so I don't feel quite so alone and like I'm the only one who lives like we do