Chapter 5 – Clean the house they’re coming

We have just woken up on a Sunday morning a lot earlier than usual considering it is the weekend, at the ridiculous time of seven o’clock and our plan for the day is to make the house look as if it has never been lived in. As surely, they are going to check every single floor and carpet, to ensure there is no sign at all of any hidden dirt, because in our minds they would not place a child into a house that was not super clean. So up we get ready for a day as Cinderella herself, on our hands and knees scrubbing the floors and making sure absolutely everything is in its place. It’s times like this you really do need a fairy godmother, as we both knew this was going to be a job and a half, especially for Rich, who bless him is not exactly the most frequent user of a duster.

First things first before the day starts is a coffee for Lew and breakfast for Rich, which today is limited only to cereal as anything we use will have to be washed, dried and put away, which is just creating more work. Now fed and watered, our plan of action is quickly the topic of conversation, which started so well with a plan of working our way round the house together to clean room by room. I mean the rooms are basically clean already, we don’t have kids yet and are quite simplistic and modern with our decoration, so there surely cannot be that much to do. An hour into the cleaning, we realise that this is just not going to be the best way to do things as it is taking too long, not because we are dirty but because every couple of minutes we are stopping to talk about our thoughts about tomorrow.

What if they don’t like us or think our house isn’t suitable, what if they aren’t used to gays adopting or they have never had an application from two men before. It’s just such a big deal and all we are worried about is trying to ensure these people think our house is amazing and suitable for children to live here. Maybe they wont worry about the state of the house and they will just spend the whole time grilling us with question after question, I mean what the hell are they actually going to ask us. It would have been so much easier if they just gave us a list of the questions, so we could have rehearsed them over and over to ensure we get flying colours. Anyways, we better carry on as we haven’t really go much done yet, it’s nearly ten o’clock and we really need this all finished before we go to bed tonight.

Carrying on we decide to really focus on downstairs, as that is where they are going to be for our chat but knowing our luck, they will want a full-on bloody tour of the house. We are sure the downstairs toilet has got to be the most critical room in the house though, as there are so many things that can be judged in a downstairs bathroom. I mean the glass needs to be clear with no smears, the sinks need to be facial hair free and the most important thing is to have the softest and most luxurious toilet tissue possible, just in case the social worker cannot bloody help themselves and asks to use the toilet. Again, we are struggling with getting this room cleaned quickly enough and realise that maybe our plan for the day ahead needs to change. Not only because we are talking about all the difficult questions tomorrow, but also because a certain someone cannot clean to save their life, unless it is cleaning themselves in the shower that takes nearly the full twenty minutes on a good day. We decide to stop for lunch and head to our local pub, for a bit of pub grub and a cheeky afternoon cider to help settle the nerves a little.

We’ve now been at the pub for at least two hours chatting and chatting over our lunch, which has been served eaten and taken away quite some time ago now but it was just so easy to get caught up in the very exciting conversation of what life could be like. I mean the Disney trips, camping trips, days out at the beach and holidays would all just be so so different. We decided that 3 hours in the pub was far too long, especially when you are both sitting there with a diet coke looking like a couple of weirdos, so we headed back to the house with a new plan. Get the house done as quickly as possible, it doesn’t really need to be a show home, as surely they want to feel the love of a family home and not the emptiness of a show home in the middle of a building site. So Rich is going to hoover the whole place, as this one of the only cleaning things he is really good at and Lew is going to focus on the proper cleaning, as he likes to call it. We will then simply hide everything else that shouldn’t be out in the cupboard and hope to hell they do not ask to open that cupboard door on their possible tour, otherwise that will be it. Not only will they know we haven’t really cleaned as well as it may look, but the social worker may end up with a bump on the head from all the stuff that will get shoved in there.

Our plan seems to have worked, as it is early evening and the place looks like a palace, so we can now lounge on the sofas for a relaxed evening, chilling out watching rubbish TV. We were about ten minutes into watching a film and that is when the night turned into an evening in the call centre, as our phones were going ten to the dozen with family and friends calling to wish us good luck for tomorrow. The time flew by and before we knew it, we were heading off to bed to get some much needed beauty sleep before the big day tomorrow.