Laundry day 3 Cleanup weekend day 2

Yep, thats the inspiring title today. Labelling whats going on in the land of lets clean up. Todays goals were to clean off the kitchen bench, kitchen table, bills from my desk and 1 other job. I got through the bench and table, paid a few bills, left the rest for Monday when I can confirm what amounts I need to pay and then I got stuck into the overloaded medicine box. Which brought me up sharp against the fact that my husband is not a compulsive hoarder, but he is compulsively untidy. Everywhere I turn in this house there are signs of his neverending efforts to make the house messier. Every surface in our house looks like this and worse.

I googled a bit and found some good links that helped me realise I could keep going with getting the house clean around him. http://www.compulsive-hoarding.org/About.html has a good insight into some of the underlying hoarding stuff. I found this site particularly useful with great tips that seem practical - http://www.lifedesignstrategies.com/art/my_partner_is_a_clutterbug.html Basically going to visit those sites got me past the overwhelming sadness and despair that hit when I realised how insidious and constant the cluttering is in my home. I really need to continue every day taking the time to fight the clutter or I will never get on top of it. I discovered today that in addition to a big box of medicines at the top of our pantry, and a selection that had expanded above the microwave, that my hubbie had taken off with my large Tupperware cake carrier and loaded the lid of that up with more medicinal stuff!!! All of it got tipped out onto the kitchen table and I repacked and re-sorted it all out so that I have a small neat group above the microwave, the original medicine box and one small box for the excessive amount of bandaids I found! Tonight I'm continuing my laundry 20 minutes. I have finished a load all the way to put away and will head in there now to put away some more of the clean washing pile. It is helping to focus on the laundry to help catch up or get ahead on that area for this week. Tomorrow's cleanup focus is on the outside of the house, mowing the lawn and possibly tidying up the back verandah.

Crunching the numbers

I've decided I simply don't do enough housework. Sounds reasonable right? Simple enough to work out? Well its still a revelation in my world. The sheer volume of time (is that some sort of grammatical oopsie?) that I need to spend to get through this mess of my house must be over double, probably triple what I currently DO spend. Its a tall order to try to get through the normal daily grind AS WELL as decluttering and cleaning out from behind all the clutter in a minimal amount of hours a day. Today is Day 1 of a hopefully 3-day child and husband free declutter / cleaning frenzy. Things started off well, I wrote a quick list of my 'initial' things to do, and then realised during the day that I wasn't going to make my goal of 'catch up on normal cleaning plus one extra job' unless I really took time to finish this evening. In total I probably spent around 2-3 hours cleaning today. It was not enough! 4 hours and I'd see some real progress after a few days. So I'm sticking with laundry week (today was 3 loads washed and dried, sorting tomorrow), but I'm going to see how tired I am after a weekend cleaning frenzy and see if I can stick to the 3 hours a day at least until I make some inroads into the cluttered messy areas. Here are some before and after shots of my 'project' tonight, the kitchen windowsill.