The secret to cleaning success.

I hate cleaning.  Did you know that?

There are, in fact, few things I hate more than cleaning.  Of course, different chores and different rooms have differing levels of distaste.  For example - I would rather clean about 100 public bathrooms than sweep and mop my own floors.  At least when you're cleaning a bathroom, everything looks white and shiny and smooth and clean when you're done.  This is completely different from cleaning the floor, which looks good for about the first 2 seconds and is then promptly re-covered in dog hair/puke/mud.

On a related note, it really sucks that I hate doing floors, because we have the two dogs, who are very, very dirty, and shed like mofos.

Even though my mother is very clean and has kept my parents' home basically immaculate for as long as I can remember, I learned pretty much everything I know about cleaning from Wife, and Martha Stewart.  This isn't because my mother didn't try to teach me proper cleaning skills - it's because I made it my job as a kid to ignore, avoid, and half-ass every cleaning-oriented chore she gave me, therefore learning basically nothing.

Now I'm an adult with a house and two dogs, and since I'm the one who still gets school vacations, deep-cleaning, and regular cleaning when I'm not in school, frequently falls to me.  (In Wife's defense, this is more than fair, since I basically turn into an angry hermit for about a month surrounding exams each semester and do absolutely nothing to help out around the house.)

While I'm still pretty bad at it, there are a few things I've picked up over the last 4 years (slowly, painfully) that make my life easier on cleaning days.

1)  Always dust from the top down.  It's pointless to dust a table before you dust the shelf above it, because all the dust from the shelf is just going to fall on the table.
2)  Sweep at least twice before mopping if you have dogs, children, or you leave your own home more than once annually.  Sweeping only once just results in you making soapy mud with the mop later.
3)  Windex does, in fact, leave streaks on glass if you don't wipe until it's dry.  I have yet to figure out a way to actually do that, so Wife has learned to live with streaky mirrors.
4)  Just because an oven says "self-cleaning" doesn't mean you don't have to do anything at all.  If you don't clean the crumbled oven-ash out of the bottom after you run a clean cycle, it will smoke and set off your fire alarms or smoke detectors and make anything you bake or broil taste vaguely of charcoal for about a month.
5)  If you can't immediately identify it, it's usually best not to ask what it is you just wiped off the mirror/cabinet door/floor/wall/ceiling/fridge door/shelf/anything.  When you have dogs, there's a 50/50 chance the answer will be either poop or puke.  Just wash your own hands after and call it a day.
6)  Laundry should be folded ASAP after drying so it doesn't turn into a shriveled wrinkled mess.  (I am currently blogging to avoid folding freshly dried laundry.  I frequently fail to take my own advice.)
7)  Pet hair is magnetically attracted to corners, underneath furniture, and all other places generally difficult to reach with a broom.  There's nothing you can do about this except swear copiously while sweeping (twice).

My penultimate recommendation for cleaning, however, is something that I cannot do and few people can:

Hire a goddamn cleaning service and pay someone else to do this shit for you.