You may have read in previous weeks that we are getting ready to remodel the house. I’m excited we’ll be starting this weekend with the upstairs bedrooms. Now the first room isn’t so difficult – it’s mine. I spend little time in my room, so there’s hardly anything but a bed and a few dressers in there. There’s not much that needs to be moved. In fact, since we’re just doing the walls right now, everything will just need to be moved into the middle of the room. That is, except for what’s in the closet. That I’m going to have to clean out. It’s not a large closet, but large enough to have tons of clothes shoved into it. Like most women (I suspect), it’s shoved full of clothes I will never be able to wear again. I’ve been hanging on to them in hopes maybe some day...
For some reason no matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to get the garage cleaned up enough to get a car inside. After last night’s thunderstorms and hail, I realized I need to try a little harder. The main problem right now is a very large cabinet that was moved out of the kitchen. Whoever decided right by the door was a good place for it was out of their minds. Sadly it was probably ME. Even though spending money is the last thing I want to do most of the time, I did hire someone to haul some garbage on more than one occasion. Usually local guys who do odd jobs like this are pretty cheap, usually costing under $50. It’s well worth the money too, because all you have to do is load up a trailer with all your junk and they take care of the rest. However, that cabinet is just too big for me to move on my own up into a trailer....
Since the kids are on summer vacation (or might be soon in your case), the house may be getting unorganized and messy faster than it did when they were in school. Getting kids to do chores sometimes is more effort than just doing it yourself, but worth the reward if they are picking up good habits. Laundry in our house is always an issue. If it isn’t piled up in dirty laundry baskets, it’s piled up waiting to be put away. Making the trip upstairs to put it away seems like a chore on it’s own so is often skipped. I know this needs to be changed, and I plan to get the kids involved. Starting yesterday we came up with a plan to tackle the laundry. Every day, somewhere shortly after everyone is fully awake and had breakfast, we are putting away a few clothes each. Since both kids have a horrible habit of going outside for a...
The weather is finally nice enough that it’s time to venture outside! Over the weekend I realized how much my yard needed attention. Not so much the yard itself, but my flower beds had far too many weeds. The bad thing is they weren’t just any weeds, but the kind that sting me. Thus the reason why I’ve been putting this off. But this weekend I grabbed the gloves and started pulling. The side of the house looks so much better than it did, but it still needs some work. While I love my lily of the valley, it just doesn’t look good where it’s growing. It’s next to impossible to pull weeds and grass around lily of the valley so it’s just got to go (and for those who have never seen lily of the valley, it’s not much bigger than grass and will NOT kill off the weeds like tiger lily will). Luckily I...
Last week the focus was on sorting clothes and I didn’t get as far as I would have liked to. While I did go through the 4 massive tubs of clothes we got over a week ago, I never made it upstairs to short out the smaller clothes. So I’m going to try to get a bit more of that accomplished while I work on this week’s challenge – the computer desk. It’s pretty ugly looking right now, with paper stacked and things kinda thrown everywhere. I really need to sort through everything and organize it a bit. I joke that my desks likes to “eat” things like pens and other small items. Ok so not even small items – it’s been known to eat larger items as well. Yeah, time to clean it. How did you do on last week’s challenge? Are you joining us this week? Read More →
I actually got a jump start on this yesterday knowing I was going to be gone today for a few hours. My daughter is lucky to have several older cousins who all have some very nice clothes. The other day we got 3 big boxes dumped on us, plus more boxes still sitting upstairs needing to be sorted. It’s time to sort. This week I’ll be sorting all the clothes we’ve gotten and going through her drawers to see what fits and what doesn’t. I probably should have a better system in place for all this, but I really don’t. We are getting clothes faster than I can sort them, and I can’t seem to get rid of the small ones fast enough either. I’ve also come to realize that I need to have my daughter right there with me because we really can’t judge sizes very well. When I started yesterday I was sorting clothes...
Since we’ve got family and friends visiting this weekend, I figured this week is a good week to clean up the main room of the house. In our house the “main room” is our living room, dining room, and where the computers sit. In your house it might just be the living room, or it may be something different. The goal here is to clean up whatever it room your guests see the most, and the room you spend the most time in. If you are good about cleaning up your house, this might not be a big job. However, I bet there are still areas that need improvement. How do the windows look? The walls? How about behind desks, under tables, and in drawers? Our room happens to be a complete and utter mess right now so I doubt we’ll get to those fine details. But if you are in need of a challenge this week, go for the small spaces and...
You may have noticed that we didn’t have our “Monday Organization” yesterday. Mostly because I didn’t get my challenge done, but also because I realized that Mondays just aren’t good for cleaning. Not only do we now have regular appointments on Mondays, but that’s dance night too. Time is very limited and I never really have time to get any major housework done. As a result it gets pushed to the end of the week, or completely forgotten (yes I actually FORGOT last week!). So instead I’ve decided to move it to Tuesday, and name it “Tidy Tuesday”, where we’ll pick small ideas for tidying up your home and life. This week I thought it would be nice to take a break from the housework side and focus on an area that needs attention too – the bills. Now for this challenge you don’t...
It’s Monday again, and time to pick another area of the house to clean up and organize for the week! Last week we focused on the bathroom getting areas we all dread. I’m happy to report that I DID get down on my hands and knees scrubbing even though I seriously dreaded it. I didn’t get the entire bathroom cleaned, but I did do one important area – the litter box. YUCK! But boy did I feel better once it was done. This week it’s time to focus on a much less yucky area (we hope anyway). The kitchen could use some organizing and cleaning, so I believe this is a good area to focus on this week. Organizing this room would include going through cabinets, cleaning out your fridge, giving the stove a much needed cleaning, or organizing your recycling if you keep it there. Don’t worry about not getting it all finished...
How long has it been since you’ve really scrubbed your bathroom? I know, it’s one of those jobs we tend to put off. It’s my most hated of all household chores, and I tend to avoid at all cost. Regardless, it needs to be cleaned. It spreads germs when not clean. We HAVE to do it. So the challenge for the week is to get the bathroom sparkling. Clean the bathtub, sink, and toilet. Grab your best germ fighting cleaning products (or possibly some bleach), and dive in. Don’t stop there! If you have closets, shelves, medicine cabinets, etc…..organize those too. This is something I did not long ago, so I get to skip this one. But the scrubbing, well that I NEED to do again. Ick. Read More →
