Clutterfree.org

I will admit, I have not gotten nearly as much done as planned since starting this blog. I got sick, did nothing, got better, did a little, and then lost motivation. However, nothing makes you move faster than unexpected company coming to town which means panic and crisis cleaning!

I got the call yesterday that my mother and stepfather were coming just for the day. They live a little over two hours away so their trips are usually planned in advanced and they are almost always overnight trips (usually at my brother’s who has more room). So imagine my surprise to find out they were coming. I was happy yet panic stricken at the same time.

Crisis Cleaning Mode

Assessing my house I knew that it wasn’t going to be perfect however, I could still organize the paper clutter in piles (a lot had slowly gravitated to half the dining room table) while stashing toys and other clutter. However, I still had the daunting task of doing piles of laundry, cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming, sweeping, mopping and the list goes on… And true to style I did a lot of procrastinating which kept me up cleaning until 4 AM!

I really do have a lot of bad habits to change. After all, if I would just break the big jobs into smaller ones and do a little each day I wouldn’t have been faced with crisis cleaning. How hard would it be to practice maintenance each day?

Well unfortunately they were unable to come after all, I got a call this morning that my mother was sick. However, as tired as I was it was nice to know that I woke up to a house that was polished, vacuumed, clean floors, a clean bathroom and no dishes in the sink. Sure there is that pile in the dining room that is still nagging at me but now that I have make the rest of the house presentable (at least what everyone sees) I feel so much better.

I can now focus on my dining room paper clutter without stressing about the rest of the house for now. Don’t get me wrong, I still have mounds of clutter in the bedrooms to deal with not to mention stashes hidden in the closets but just knowing that our main living areas that everyone sees is presentable means I wont feel so embarrassed about an unexpected knock on the door. Now my goal is to keep the rest of the house neat with daily maintenance while I dig back into the dining room clutter-30 minutes at a time…

Sometimes crisis cleaning is all it takes to get back motivated .

Is there really such a thing as clutter organization? My thinking is, if it is useful then it isn’t clutter and if it is junk, it is clutter and it has got to go! (I say this after a week of being sick and still not getting back to decluttering my dining room). My husband on the other hand, has his own way of dealing with clutter, by putting everything into neat stacks.

Now I can understand why he is organizing clutter. After all, piles of disorganized papers will easily topple over after a while, but my new way of thinking is, why handle something twice? Why not just handle the clutter once?

I am a upset with myself that in the last week i have gotten nowhere. I was really proud of the fact that I didn’t get sick at all over Winter and now that we finally get some warmer weather I get hit hard with some sort of virus, start feeling better and then feel bad all over again. But enough whining, this time I think that I am finally on the road to recovery.

So it’s been over two weeks since I started my clutter free blog and I haven’t done much besides filling three garbage bags with papers and freeing up a few laundry baskets. I will make up for lost time though. I really need to reclaim my dining room then move on to the clothing and kitchen clutter.

There is one more bright spot. Since reclaiming my living room my son has been really cooperative about keeping his toys picked up. It isn’t always perfect but he knows that he can only bring out a few things at a time and we do make it a point to pick up his toys each night.

So really, even if things haven’t gone as planned it is nice to know that we have established one new cleaning routine, however small and every little bit really helps.