We’ve All Been There: The After-Party Clean Up

Mmmm. Mysterious dark spots on the floor.

You wake up with one thing on your mind and one thing only: water. You want to drink it, you want to bathe in it, you want to take advantage of all of its healing powers. You stumble out of your room and head to the kitchen. When you take one step out the door, however, you realize this is a mission you cannot accomplish without shoes.

By Lauren

Thanks to last night’s party, your house is a disaster. There are empty beer cans everywhere, the floor is soaked with beer, and for some reason there is an empty jar of pizza sauce on the floor and marinara hand prints all over the kitchen walls. And [vomit] the smell. Gross.

You dig a pair of flip flops out from under a pile of dirty clothes and head to the oasis that is your Brita in the fridge. You tear the duct tape off of the cabinet (because obviously duct tape will prevent drunk people from rifling through your things) and grab a cup. As you chug your 3rd glass of that sweet nectar from the gods, your roommates, also wearing shoes, start trickling into the kitchen.

You stand around recapping the evening and are faced with the ultimate decision: do you sit in the living room filth and enjoy a full recap over coffee (whilst praying that no one peed on that couch), or do you break out the Swiffer and clean up this hot mess?

Unable to stand the smell of stale beer and vomit (looks like someone missed the sink a little bit…), you and the roomies band together, crack open the front door to air out the place and start the cleanup process.

You plug in your iPod and blast the party mix from the night before. There is no reason cleaning up after 100 people can’t also be a party. You grab the mop and “Superman That Ho” as you work up a sweat on the floor. Meanwhile, your roommate walks around the house and fills a garbage bag with red Solo cups, empty cans and a few empty bottles of Boones Farm. (She doesn’t find them all, which you realize a week later when you find some in the washing machine, under your bed and behind the toilet…)

While she’s completing her scavenger hunt, another roommate is working on the bathroom. Not only is all of the toilet paper gone, but someone squeezed your entire bottle of conditioner out all over the shower floor. The towels hanging on the back of the door are also mysteriously wet. She uses a paper towel to grab them and throw them in the laundry basket.

The entire clean up process – including a search for all the cereal boxes that were on top of the fridge,  putting all the furniture back in the right place, and going through an entire box of Swiffer Wet Pads to mop up the mixture of dirt and beer caking the floor – takes hours.

But when it’s all done and your house smells like the pumpkin candle burning on the coffee table instead of morning-after-frat-party, you feel ready for a nap good.  You kick off those flip flops and sink into the couch (covered in a towel – you still don’t know if that’s clean), a fresh cup of coffee in hand. Now there is nothing to do but pass around the digital cameras and share your favorite moments of the night.

And maybe have someone explain the marinara mural.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. Clean up’s a bitch, but the party is always worth it.