Cleaning and Organizing

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I got a good start to some cleaning this week. I went through my laundry room again, which was nothing like it had been when I did the big clean in there, so the job was pretty quick.. reorganize the shelves, pull “stuff” out and vacuum, sweep and mop the floors, etc… Then I moved onto my hallway. I have a couple of floor mats in front of my back door so I removed those and cleaned the floor underneath and around the edges, cleaned up the mats well. We get a lot of rain here, which equals a lot of mud and this gets brought into the house and lots of it ends up around and under these floor mats.


Then I moved into the kitchen. I scrubbed my stove top, cleaned the vent (it is a center vent between the burners), and did a little cleaning inside of the oven, and cleaned the outside. Leanne and I then spent some time cleaning off the fronts of lower kitchen cabinets and did a good scrub job of the floor.

By the time I was done the house was looking pretty nice! I still have more on my list to get down but feel like I am off to a good start and got a handle on the areas that were bugging me.

Sometimes it is hard to know where to start when the list is long. I always start with what bothers me the most.. if one room or area, for whatever reason, bugs me a lot, that is the place I start.


For now I am move my efforts to the basement. I have an area in my basement that I use for storage. I have Rubbermaid totes stacked and marked with whatever is stored in them. The idea is this, you find something in the house that needs to be stored and you go down to the storage totes, find the one that holds that item and put it in there. That works great until you have kids that are in a hurry and don’t want to put stuff where it belongs! LOL.. so it gets tossed on top of the stack of totes instead. When this happens more times during the year the area starts to look a bit chaotic. That is where I am now with my storage area. Plus I have some totes with items that are no longer needed. I keep stuff thinking I might want to use it someday and I figure after a couple of years if I have not used it (that would be if I actually remembered I had it to begin with LOL).. it is time for it to go. I am actually looking forward to tossing stuff. I really want to get a handle on it and downsize my possessions, especially as my family size is downsizing. I will keep you updated on my basement progress and if I am brave enough I will take some before/after pics like I did with my laundry clean up.


The other area I am focusing on lately is our daily schedule. It takes time it seems to get out of vacation mode with my kids. On Monday we got up earlier and started right in on chores and school work. Slowly this week we are getting into the old groove.. :)

That is all from the Homestead for today.. I will post more about my “not so normal” daily schedule and how I work with this on my next blog post..
 

Comments

  1. RhondaJanuary 7, 2011 at 7:34 AM

    I hear ya' on this cleaning and organizing. That's what I'm doing right now in our household, and it DOES feel good to get rid of stuff!

    ReplyDelete
  2. allisamazingJanuary 7, 2011 at 10:00 AM

    Wow, you have been busy. It's been slow going here trying to get back into a regular routine but you have certainly motivated me. ~Alana~

    ReplyDelete

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