This week I've started on a third project, the 'Front Room'. This room used to be the living room. At one stage, when our roof was leaking and yet to be repaired, it was our bedroom and living room, many years ago. Now it has given itself over the main residence of the decrepit cat of all blindness. He hangs on in this little spot, we've kicked the children out of the room, so the TV went back upstairs and its no longer the living room. In a stroke of opportunistic genius, I've decided to transform it into my husband's 'cave', alongside the cat :)
However before I can get carried away with the idea of a home to put the thousand screwdrivers, nuts, bolts and other man-stuff that hubby leaves lying around all over the house; the whole room needs a thorough cleanup. A daunting task, as its been allowed to turn into a bit of a cesspit in recent months.
I spent a few days pottering, using the simple principle of leaving the room better than I found it, and not achieving a great deal. I really had no idea where to start. The solution came to me more as a desperate idea than a full-blown certainty. In order to give myself somewhere to simply BEGIN, I decided to break the cleaning down into sections. Normally I'd clean the floors first, but in this situation that seemed pointless as the floors were basically acquiring flotsam from the junk falling off the piled up surfaces. So I took my phone and photographed every surface area that was junked up. Sadly on its last legs (like the cat), my phone managed to make every photo a hazy milky tone. Here's an example:
It does a wonderful job of highlighting the junk, even with the surreal effect.
Surprisingly, as soon as I'd taken the photos, I was resolved to tackle all the surfaces first, and to finish as many as possible today. I remarked that it would be a miracle if I got through them all.
I should have had more faith because as I write this, all 5 areas of the room that were the same and worse than this have been totally cleaned off. The Wrecking Ball soundtrack helped, and it took the entire album to get through it all. I have one tiny nemesis of paperwork and fiddly rubbish in the bottom of the green 'Trofast' drawer in this picture. After finishing this blog, I'll be working on that till bedtime!
I've exceeded my expectations for the day, all by simply breaking down the job into smaller pieces that were not so daunting. There were still hurdles along the way, and plenty of interruptions and breaks. Having the photographs helped to keep me focussed on how I'd progressed, and finishing off one discreet area at a time was terrific motivation to move on to the next area and the next. I even did a lot of bargaining with myself, deciding I was going to stop when I finished the top of the bookcase, and was so inspired by finishing that I kept going and started on the couch, then moved on to everywhere else!
Even the deep freezer had a mountain of stuff piled on it.
Now I'm feeling invincible and ready to have the whole room spick and span tomorrow, ready for its new life as the 'cave'!
We put up these little storage racks in a random spot temporarily as having them in use somewhere was better than all the component parts lying around :) Plus they are now filled with things, mostly all the tiny bits of Lego lying around.
And the most wonderful bonus of the exercise was that I found the first ring hubby ever bought me, it is more sentimental than my wedding and engagement rings and had been missing for over a year!
I haven't set the goals for tomorrow's instalment yet, but I'm sure that making the job smaller with manageable sections will be the backbone of how I get through it!
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