How To Clean Your Stank-Ass House Before The Guests Arrive

Been busy lately? Short on time? Just a lazy sack of crap with no motivation nor the wherewithal to get done what needs to get done?

Maybe you’ve been shuffling the kids around or caring for a loved one. Maybe you’ve working long hours, so making preparations for the upcoming holidays and cleaning have had to fall by the wayside. If you find yourself in a jam—as I often do—with guests set to arrive in half an hour and your house is caked in grime like an abandoned shack in an ABC Family Halloween Special, then fear not because I have a foolproof cleaning guide just for you.

1. Big Filth First.

Time is of the essence here, so the first thing you need to do is gather together all the dirty dishes and trash lurking about the rooms of your house. Used tissues, candy wrappers, string-cheese plastics—gather them up room-by-room in a small grocery bag. Bowls with fermenting milk and old cereal, plates with days-old pizza, cups half filled with coffee need to go. Throw away the actual dishes if you have to. I don’t care, just get rid of this shit. It’s disgusting.

2. Shit You Were Too Lazy To Put Away When You Were Done With It.

What’s the matter with you? You took the nail clippers out of their pouch from the wall closet by the bathroom and then left them sitting on the dining room table next to your plate of Sunday pancakes (the plate you’ve taken care of in step one). Take an empty box, or a bag, or whatever is handy and toss everything in here that doesn’t belong in the room. Small pile of clean clothes tossed on your couch? Throw them in here. Random jump rope in your kitchen? In it goes. When you’re finished, stash the box away somewhere guests will never go. Do you have a room that’s filled with junk that you keep locked? Put it in there for the time being. Under a bed, in a secret closet, on the basement steps—doesn’t matter, just hide that shit.

3. Dust It Off.

Now that the trash and clutter is dealt with, it’s time to move on to the filth. If you have three dogs like I do and haven’t vacuumed in two weeks, you have a lot to do. Brush off the tumbleweeds of dog hair and/or food crumbs from the surfaces. Wipe down slobber that has collected on your walls from your pets/kids, and bust out the Pledge, vinegar, or sandblaster and get to dusting that rotten garbage pit you call a home.

I assume after all of this, you have only fifteen minutes left, so it’s time to break out your Scentsy products and place them all over the house. If you don’t know what Scentsy is, then you’re a silly, silly person and you need to get some. Scentsy is very powerful stuff and can cover up any odor within minutes. You need to get these plugged in and going so that when your guests arrive they smell the lackadaisical aroma of cinnamon, fall leaves, and the overall awesomeness called the holiday season.

4. Is that a spider, a rat, or a clump of dog hair?

Next, get out the vacuum. Even for hardwood. We ain’t got no time for sweeping. Run about the house with the hose attachment sweeping hither and thither. Put on that brush thing on the end and do some dusting with it. If you don’t know what that giant pile of filth is under your coffee table, just suck it up with the vacuum wand. We don’t have time for guessing games and we all know how these types of mysteries can eat up an entire afternoon.

5. Let’s Mop!

Fantastic!! Get out the ole’ mop and do a quick once through. No time to scrub the scuzz between the tiles. Make sure to mop generously under surfaces like the TV stand, table/chair legs, and any other place where a thick layer of dust has collected. After you do a half-assed job at that, we’re about done.

6. Last-Minute Bullshit.

Put away all your cleaning gear. Check to see how far your Scentsy cubes have melted. Stir them around a bit if not to your satisfaction. Wipe off any surface you missed, but take no more than a minute to do it.

Now you’re finished. Go get in the bath and clean yourself up, you filthy slob. I won’t add a tutorial about this since I’m pretty sure you know what you’re doing. You’re not going to have any time left to clean the bathroom, but it’s OK. As you primp and model in front of the mirror after your shower, put away your hair brushes and other various bathroom necessities so the room looks a bit shabby, but not altogether chaotic.

When your guests arrive and your hair is up in a twisty towel, you can greet them with a smile and welcome them in with an extravagant hand wave and say, “Come in, come in! You’ll have to excuse the place, I haven’t had any time to clean.”