The lived-in look is good enough for me. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with reasonably clean and tidy. After all, even if a house is cleaned until it is immaculate, how long does that last, anyway? Not very long.
I tune out when I hear people talking about how to get the dirt out from under their refrigerators. I mean, wait until you move! Who is going to see it? And are there really people who move all their furniture every week to vacuum behind something that requires two people and a jack to move it?
I remember the mother of one of my friends who followed us around the house whenever I was over there, and she would polish the doorknobs milli-seconds after I touched them. She had three perfect birch logs in the fireplace, never burned of course, because that would cause the fireplace to have (gasp!) ashes strewn on the bottom. And I'll bet she dusted those logs too.
Of course, we could never sit on my friend's bed, because that would wrinkle the bedspread. Needless to say, I didn't go over to her house very often.
I clean enough so that no one's going to call the health department. I tidy up enough so that I can find something the next time I look for it. But scrub my toilet with a toothbrush? Wash the kitchen floor every day? Pull out every book in the bookcase when I dust. Uh, no.
There's more to life than a sterile, immaculate house!
