Cleanup Challenge Update #1

The first evening of the cleanup challenge was a roaring success! I'm amazed at the range of things I got cleaned up in just 30 minutes, all around the house. Its been a long time coming but this week's challenge is going to be good for me! First I threw out rubbish from the kitchen, picked up random washing, put away groceries that had been left on the floor in bags. Then tidied all the random shoes to the front door, cleaned cat food bowls and left in sink to soak, fed cat and turned on his heater! Cat did well from this effort! Swept up cat feeding area, plus a random muffin spillage from earlier in the evening. Also while I had the dustpan and brush, swept the traffic area of the stairs, boy was there build up of random flotsam, including what seemed to be the entire contents of a packet of raw nuts! Upstairs I put away some clean laundry, then in the living room I put toys in the toybin and tidied up the xbox controllers and games. Rearranged furniture a bit to suit my liking and swept a little of a styrofoam disaster! I also swept up where my husband had thoughtfully used a broom to make one huge pile of muck in the hallway, all in the bin now! Tossed out a great deal of recycling, empty packaging mainly! Turned off 3 lights that didn't need to be on, tidied away a few toys from the hallway and all of a sudden, 30 minutes is gone by!

My blind moggie is happy to have his warm heater :) The update from my morning's efforts is that last night both getting the laundry finished and tidying so much around the house has inspired me in the house today. I have caught up on washing up, swept the floor, installed a temporary vanity unit in the new laundry/bathroom. Next I'm off to tackle a couple of problem areas in the house that have been bugging me for ages.

Challenge Week Update!

Today marks the end of my "Laundry Challenge" and I'm happy to say it has certainly been a success! Thinking about and focussing on one area of work for the 7 days has given me the boost to make progress in the laundry, to be inspired to tackle other areas, and get something 'finished' - although the 'finished' job at the end was far simpler than the 'finished' job I hoped for on day 1. My laundry has gone from cluttered and a dumping ground for all dirty clothes wet and dry on the floor, with a huge mountain of clean clothes growing from a washing basket in the corner, to an orderly looking room with nothing on the floor, sorted dirty clothes in this great Antonius system from Ikea.

Clean washing is also sorted in Ikea, so that everyone in the family can collect and put away their own clothes easily. What I've learnt from my weekly challenge is that it is a great way to accomplish something in a particular area; that it motivates me to move and meet my 20 minutes goal every day; that I need to continue the laundry challenge and add in another challenge next week, building on the foundation of my routines until I am a powerhouse of keeping things tidy and organised! I'm so pumped by this challenge that I'm going to start my new Challenge today - this one is going to be doing a nightly clean up, every night for 8 nights! What that means in this case will be spending 5 minutes in every room, making something neater, tidying, collecting all dirty dishes and rubbish and taking them out, and where possible, pick up everything off the floor. It will probably be a 30 minutes a day job, because our house is very large and I'll be doing the whole thing!

School Routine

Todays post is short and sweet. Tonight I made, thanks to pinterest, a visual reminder card set for morning routine for my son who started school this year. Here it is

Thats it from me for today! I'll let you know if the visual aide works. Laundry day 6 in progress now, I am off to set a timer, or I'll get distracted!

Unfinished business ....

Todays thoughts are about never finishing anything or being prepared in advance with something so that I can get it completed properly. This is an increasing problem for me, 2 years ago when I started homeschooling my eldest I found it easier to work through things, now it seems impossible even getting simple tasks done. And this needs to change, it's been 2 weeks and my daughters 2nd school shoe is still missing. I am beginning to think I threw it out! But it's a sign of my scattered mind that until now I haven't cared! Yet it affects how she does at school (well it doesn't but soon I'll get a 'please explain' from the principal). I think to boost my spirits I need to plan and execute something simple but big enough to give me a sense of accomplishment. To get me over that line no matter what!

Incredible achievement of Steve Bradbury, to be the one who finished! Back to my more mundane unfinished business, I originally wanted to decorate one room as undersea theme. At the moment that seems daunting. I think instead I'll make an autumn theme and re-new our autumn wall - actually I'll do all 4 seasons and put them on a new wall in the house - with the craft all prepared before I start so kids get 4 days craft out of it with confidence that it will be completed not just a half arsed job. My TO DO list for this project looks roughly like this: Words - print out words and take to be laminated Craft - collect season craft ingredients in one box Location - find a location and make sure there is sufficient space - consider all seasons on one wall for practicality such as behind TV? Share - send to friends with children a care package ready to go; sell premade packages online Project complete! Autumn leaves, still have plus Pinterest Winter - Snowflakes doilies Spring - flowers Summer - sun craft, check Pinterest and pool theme or beach theme? I'll update with progress on the seasonal crafts later, but in the meantime, an update after today. I am shocked at how effective just thinking about things in a new light can be. Today, looking for an opportunity to finish a project, I came home from settling my father back at his nursing home, grabbed the pre-cooked potatoes from the fridge and set out making 'Tuna Beach Balls' from the recipe my daughter picked for her school lunches 2 weeks ago. Fiddly and annoying cooking, but a real hit with her, she wants 4 for morning tea! I am so glad I took the opportunity and time to make them, instead of catching up with washing up tonight. And I'm painfully aware my work isn't done as it is still laundry week and I'm heading back in there to see what I can get done tonight before bed! Please share any of your 'unfinished business'; I'd love to hear what you get stuck on.

Habits v's Guilt

Today has me thinking about the way to make a new habit. All the experts say, do something for 30 consecutive days and its a habit. Great. In my experience about all I manage in 30 consecutive days is eating and sleeping (the blog hasn't made it that far even). However I do have some thoughts on the tricky balance between trying to create a new habit, and being swamped by guilt and despair at being unable to stick at anything for 30 days. This line of thought is triggered by circumstances today. Not only am I still up at the hospital with Dad trying to get him enough pain relief, but my elder daughter came down with flu-like symptoms and needed a close eye for a while there. So my plans to conquer the lawn went awry about 10am. Although the mower and the lawn had a pretty big get together before that and between us, my husband and I mowed about 1/3 of the block. Go us!

Then there was juggling the whole sick girl, pained father issue. It basically took over the day. Spending a bit of it reading "The Hobbit" aloud to my sick girl and both of us falling asleep took up a few hours! I'll write more about that another time. What I am realising however is that the past few days, allocating 'extra' time to cleaning the house is what I need to be doing every day. Not just sometimes. Because life will continue to happen, not every day is going to give me a free 3 hours to declutter. I can apply the pricipal I learnt when pregnant with my eldest child. In order to prevent gestational diabetes, I took up exercise. My husband and I walked every evening for 20 minutes around the neighbourhood. Those walks became a daily routine. But there were days they didn't happen. sometimes even multiple days in a row. Normally after a few days of missed walking I'd be so filled with guilt and it would serve only to hold me back and make getting out the door bigger than ben hur and too big a deal, too hard. What I learnt 9 years ago however (and seem to have forgotten) is that it doesn't matter if you miss a day, or how many days you miss. All you need to do is pick yourself up and keep going. Just don't 'stop' or even think that you've stopped. I need to apply this principle to my cleaning.

In my case its not just about swimming, but how much swimming! I need to remember to keep swimming at least 2 hours a day to get any progress! I find I've been unable to do this as yet, but from here on the idea is to just transfer that mindset from evening walks to devoting sufficient time to the cleanliness of the house. It just simply has to be done. Too many years and too much illness and neglect. The time to change all of it is now. I also had a scary thought I'll be saving for later. If I have too much stuff to look after, then I need less stuff to make life easier!!! OR, what I'm trying first, is spending more time every day on upkeep.

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.