Company’s coming. Quick, let’s clean

As much as we say we don’t like to clean our homes, two little words remain the biggest motivator for getting out the mop and broom: “Company’s coming.”

“I tell my kids that I clean occasionally,” says Diane Korpinen, a mother of four from Thousand Oaks who juggles a frightening schedule of after-school chauffeuring and a full-time job. “If we’re having an occasion, I clean for it.”

Our relationship with cleaning is ambivalent enough to be noted by academia and studied by the cleaning business. And it’s just dysfunctional enough to become a product innovator’s dream. Since 2000, corporate America has invented such “instant cleaning” aids as pullout wipes for polishing windows and the ubiquitous Swiffer -- designed to keep a loaded symbol, the mop and bucket, in the closet.

Though women ages 18 to 64 do half the housework they did in 1965, “men are actually cleaning more than they did 40 years ago,” says John Robinson, a sociology professor and director of the Americans’ Use of Time Project at the University of Maryland. The study has been tracking the way we spend time for almost 40 years.

Although men are contributing more -- and more than a few women would insist that’s not saying much -- the Maryland study attributes the decline in time spent cleaning to more women working and fewer people having children or marrying (allowing them to maintain lower standards without the annoying interference of a mate).

“But there’s also that hedonistic tendency we have to go with activities we enjoy ... and housework is at the bottom of the list,” Robinson says. Yet most of us still care about fooling the outside world into thinking, yes, the house always looks this nice, thank you. But why?

“It’s the whole idea of social comparison,” says Virgil Adams, an assistant professor of psychology at Cal State Channel Islands. “In the absence of real or objective standards of correctness, we’ll look at others to see if our behavior is appropriate.”

And if we haven’t been invited over to anyone’s house lately, we’ll settle for convenient small-screen comparisons that have been setting the bar impossibly high since Lucy and Ricky Ricardo lived in a brownstone on New York’s East 68th Street.

“Except perhaps ‘The Odd Couple,’ you don’t really see too many funky homes on television,” Adams says. “People are conscious of that and it contributes to establishing standards. Everyone is looking around trying to figure out if the house is good enough.”

On TV, no one seems to have heard of picking up the phone before dropping by, but in the real world most guests give their hosts fair warning. If someone did stop by unexpectedly, would your house be company ready?

To answer that, you need to decide what “company ready” means to you. And chances are the answer is tied neatly into your childhood. Almost 90% of us learned to clean from our mothers, according to a 2004 National Spring Cleaning survey by the Soap and Detergent Assn., a nonprofit trade group based in Washington, D.C. A similar percentage consider cleaning “important to keeping their families happy, healthy and safe.”

“My mother’s priority was keeping a neat house, so she wasn’t able to make any of my football games where I performed at halftime with the drill team band,” says Korpinen. “I’ve hardly missed a football game, but my house is rarely tidy.”

Still, the standards set during her childhood stuck enough to cause her guilt, which no doubt would please her mother. If unexpected company came knocking, “I’d be absolutely horrified and mortified and embarrassed,” Korpinen says. “I’d let you in, but then I’d apologize. I’d make excuses, and I’d wish you caught me on the rare occasion that we do clean for company.”

For some, “company ready” means every room in the house needs to be model-home perfect and dust-free (at least until your mother’s eyesight starts going). Others follow the “15-minute rule”: The entire family runs around cleaning like crazy for 15 minutes, hurling things into closets and hiding them under beds. For the majority of us, the answer lies somewhere in between.

Oh, to be back in 1922 when, according to etiquette maven Emily Post, the “company ready” rules were as clear as a window without streaks. “Every house has an outward appearance to be made as presentable as possible, an interior continually to be set in order, and incessantly to be cleaned,” Post wrote in “Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home.”

Of course, in those days, the head of the household -- pretty much always the woman -- often had staff to help with the “incessant” part of cleaning. Imagine Post’s confusion if she were forced to set a standard today. Only 7% of Americans employ professional cleaners, according to the Videla Institute of Cleaning Science, the marketing research arm of O-Cedar cleaning products, in Northlake, Ill.

Dust on the piano loses its importance when women have more ways to define themselves, most of it from what they do outside the home, says Rebecca Kim, a Pepperdine University assistant sociology professor.

“A woman’s identity is not determined largely by how clean her house is, how nicely decorated it is and how good her food tastes,” Kim says. The need to keep the living room off-limits and in museum-quality condition has all but disappeared.

Most people would agree with Janine Tucker, a mother of two in Bethesda, Md., who calls routine cleaning a “necessary evil.” Like many working moms, Tucker complains that “my spouse does not clean and my kids don’t clean unless they’re looking for something.”

That all changes when company comes. “My husband used to make fun of me for trying to clean up for company,” Tucker says. “Now he helps straighten up before we have company. What a change! He does care.”

Pat Remick, a working mother of two in Portsmouth, N.H., agrees. “The only time my house is totally clean is when we are going to have visitors.... This generates a cleaning frenzy. If we are having a party, the downstairs has to be spotless.”

Despite pushing cleaning down the to-do list, the “company readiness” of someone else’s home still matters to more than half of us, according to the spring cleaning survey. When asked what makes the biggest impact when they first enter a home, 51% of respondents put cleanliness in the top spot.

If only cleaning the house was as easy as twitching your nose, a la Samantha on “Bewitched,” another sitcom character prominent in baby boomer childhoods. For today’s mere mortals, there’s the allure of those “instant cleaning” products, sales of which topped $1 billion last year.

“People say they have less time to clean and so there are more and more products that play to the idea of convenience,” says Don Montuori, editor of Packaged Facts, a Rockville, Md., publisher of syndicated market research reports.

“I just heard the other day about a new product that will wipe marks off the wall,” he says.

In our hate-to-clean society, the extra seconds it takes to pull out a rag and spray-bottle cleaner may be too much of a time -- and mental -- commitment.

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Robin Greene Hagey is a Los Angeles-area writer. She can be reached at home@latimes.com.