This is very weird for me.

At the age of 29 and a half, I seem randomly to have become houseproud. This, after approximately 24 years (I’m estimating that I started being responsible for my own bedroom at about 5) of being a bona fide slob, washing re-user and piles-of-dishes-ignorer.

Gus and I moved into our new house a week past last Friday. We’re settled already – although by “settled” I don’t actually mean “unpacked” or “organised” or anything like that, just that this old place feels like home. And for some reason, living at “home” (as opposed to in a microflat or a money pit) makes me want to keep my accommodation clean and tidy.

This might come as some surprise to anybody who’s ever lived with me (or in fact visited me)  in the past. Flashbacks to student accommodation at Sciennes remind me uncomfortably that the posh boys who lived upstairs kept their flat far cleaner than I ever did, give or take a slice of courgette that remained stuck to their wall for the length of the year.

Even moving from scummy studentsville to a proper grown-up flat with my then best friend didn’t encourage me to pull my inside-out-for-one-last-wear socks up.

But now – how times have changed. I caught myself last week mentally creating a daily plan of which room I would be cleaning once everything was unpacked. 7 days in a week, and 7 rooms in the house (if you count the hall/stair as one room) work out nicely, giving me something to polish and primp every day.

I spent my Saturday morning this week cleaning the kitchen, organising my assorted herbs and spices into attractive uniform jars from IKEA, and wiping down the microwave and kitchen units. Today was spent scrubbing fake tan tidemarks off the bath, and washing the sponge I’d used afterwards. I’m even having wild thoughts about perhaps mowing the lawn, should it stay dry for another hour or so.

This is so unlike me, that it’s actually freaking me out a bit. I mean, I guess I always knew on some level that my slovenly ways would have to come to an end some day – it’s not like you can bring up a child amongst piles of crumpled clothes and discarded mail. But the drama of the change is something that’s taken me completely by surprise.

Is this another crazy hormonal thing that I can attribute to the pregnancy? Am I perhaps “nesting”?

Certainly, I have a bit of a horror of being as bored again as I was during the first trimester, when I was too tired to move anywhere, and feeling too sick to do anything if I’d been able to move. My part time job shifts work out in such a way that I have 6 days off on the trot every two weeks, and the thought of spending them lying fitfully on the couch,  exercising my remote-control muscles does make me feel the urge to get up and clean something.

Well, whatever is causing it, I’m just going to go with my new found housepride and embrace my apparent destiny as a born-again housewife. If I can manage to do so without morphing into some sort of dreadful 1950s stereotype, that is.

Bugger! It looks like it’s going to rain. Now what can I do instead of mowing the lawn…?