There seemed to be a decent amount of interest in this thread in a board organization support group, like the Weight Loss group, only for your reeking pit of a house. I know a lot of people try to get their act together in January, post-resolution, and I think it would help me somewhat to have somewhere to report successes and discuss methods and tips. If it doesn’t catch on, we can just let it die a quiet death. Anybody else in?
I’m in. My allergies are acting up big time because of all the dog hair floating around.
I’m in. Not only dog hair but clutter. And I need to de-clutter the house before knee surgery in late February, so I actually have motivation and a realistic deadline.
Hi! I can always use a little extra motivation and support. (I need to clean off that pile of clothes on my cedar chest, dammit!)
I’m in. Do we get free stuff? Rubber gloves and cleaning solution, or something?
I feel the vibe and I have a story to contribute.
I have been as you are, for many, many more years than I care to own.
I loathed the idea of jumping up after a good meal to clear up - forget it. I could always find something more interesting to do than clean house. Good lord, who finds cleaning more engaging than living after all? I never had people over who were not my intimate friends and familiar with ‘conditions’ on the ground. We were two adults with no kids what did it matter? It’s just dust, cobwebs, a dirty glass, no biggie! Every now and again a typhoon of cleanliness would sweep through but I could never maintain it. We both worked two jobs, we had lots of good reasons not to find the time. Truth was I was content to smile and say, “Yeah, I’m a little housework challenged, ha, ha!” It wasn’t ruining my life but clutter and chaos never contribute anything positive, brilliant rationalizations notwithstanding.
In all honesty when I visited stay at home moms, or others with spotless homes I would think they must be the proto typical slaves to housework. That they connected their own self worth to the state of their home, home proud. That they had allowed themselves to transform into the sort of '50’s housewife I recall from my childhood. Unable to go to sleep if there were dirty dishes in the sink, unable to walk by a dirty glass left out or anything out of place. They seemed to feel their lives were unfulfilled if they weren’t preparing food for someone or watching someone eat the food they made.
I am embarassed to admit today that I saw this as weakness or character flaw and could not understand how anyone became this person. Or why anyone would want to.
Then, as they say, fate played a hand. After 44 yrs of slobbiness our lives took a turn we could not have foreseen. We bought a house to accommodate my stroke survivor, bedridden mother in law. I quit working and took on being a housefrau and caregiver. The whole nine yards, as it were. 0 - 90 in the blink of an eye. Suddenly I had to run a household that had to run efficiently, stay clean, 3 squares, diapers, drs, meds. Yeah, I was like, way, way out of my depth. I had to learn not just caregiving but housekeeping, like yesterday. The first year was enormously chaotic and traumatic, as I’m sure you can imagine. And, of course, the nature of the task is such that it absorbs your entire existence pretty easily and quickly, and the next thing you know years have flown by.
Part of the chaos of the first years was cleaning up the house for the family coming by to visit MIL. Of course we wanted them to visit, it made her days more joyous, but short notice meant mayhem to get things presentable. There were caregivers in our home almost everyday, working in the kitchen and bathroom, basic cleanliness standards had to be maintained, for true. I had so much on my plate it was so easy to let things slip by. I was really struggling, actually reeling from one thing to the next. I had to find a better way.
Like the caregiving it became easier the more organized I became. This is the system that saved me, it’s very individual, it might be a help for some of you so I will share it.
Over a couple of weeks I made a list with three columns, things needing doing more than once a week, things needing doing only once a week, and things needing doing only once every two weeks. (The idea is not to write down every little thing that needs doing but the things you overlook or don’t get to. I never had to list doing the dishes up as I had to do that so the caregiver would have a clean kitchen the next morning. You get my point, don’t list the things you already do habitually.)
Next I sat down and laid out a two week map. This was actually the tricky part and I recommend you don’t be afraid to make adjustments. For instance, certain things just go together, clean out the fridge and empty the cat litter scream to happen on garbage night. Stripping beds and picking up clothes in the bedroom obviously belong on laundry day. Or maybe you have more beds and one day should be dedicated to just stripping laundering and remaking beds. This is where the individual parts comes in. Bunch together the things that make sense in your world.
Now you want to load the days in a way that jives with how you live. For instance, my best friend always has Mondays off and I often find I end up doing things with her that day. So my chores for that day will include only light duties and most likely things which I could shift over to the next day without making it too heavy. Or, I keep Friday afternoons light as often my husband takes that time off and we do things together. So I schedule my laundry, if I walk away and leave it half done, no worries, when we come back in I’ll finish it up before going to bed, or the next morning.
This really worked for me on a couple of levels, I had a list I could check things off of, very rewarding when you spend your days largely doing what you’ll have to do all over again tomorrow, (meals, meds, etc.). But it also provided a visual aid, I didn’t have to waste precious brain cells trying to remember to get to the filthy top of the fridge, only to forget and not recall again until a very tall person is visiting :smack: . The added bonus for me was I could see the things I’d forgotten last week and make sure I hit them this week, so fewer things got into really wretched states.
Your instincts are correct, it is easier to keep your house clean than to get it clean.
I’m sorry to have run on a such length it was not my intention, I read the other threads with much interest and considered posting this story there. I’m so glad you started this thread!
I’m in.
And here’s my first tip – making your bed in the morning really does make a difference. I have never been a bed-maker, but for some reason I’ve been doing it the last few weeks. (And since “making the bed” consists of moving two pillows and giving the comforter a good shake, it takes under 15 seconds.) It’s so mucy nicer walking into the bedroom to change my clothes at the end of the day – and it makes me (believe it or not) more likely to hang up my work clothes right away instead of leaving them on the chest at the foot of the bed.
I’ve just started doing this myself. Now, I live by myself in a one-bedroom apartment, so you’d think it’d be easy.
Ha.
Anyway, I have a list of things to do everyday, things to do every week, things to do every season.
After dinner I put set the timer for a half an hour. I go through the list (which is as simple as wiping out the sinks - bathroom and kitchen) and when that half an hour is up, I stop. It’s amazing what you can get done in a half an hour, and then the rest of the night is yours!
To keep me motivated, I focus on not making things too big in my mind. Yeah, sweeping the floor and running a Swiffer over it seems like a crappy task. But it takes, like, ten minutes tops. I remind myself that I can spend ten minutes in self-recrimination for being so lazy, or I can be proud of myself. It’s not that much time, when I’m done I still have a few hours left of me-time, and I’ll feel so much better emotionally in a clean house. Plus I get to feel proud of myself everyday.
As a side note, this is also how I got myself to floss everyday. Realizing when I timed it that it’s only three minutes (to floss and do a mouth rinse), that I’ll feel better when I do it instead of the nagging crappy feeling that lasts much longer than three minutes, plus I get healthier gums! Win win! Now it’s just part of my daily routine, I hardly think about it, and can’t remember how I never seemed to have “time” to do it before.
Me too.
Like I said in the other thread I’ve got a list I follow, though I’ve totally slacked this week and my kitchen is filthy. But I did do the living room yesterday!
I wonder if it would be helpful for the listy-types among us to share our lists/charts here?
twickster I completely agree with you that making the bed makes a huge difference. In fact I need to go do that right now (plus I have work I seriously need to get done, and making the bed is a lovely procrastination tool!)
Personally, and this is embarassing, you have no idea how amazingly proud I am of myself that we’ve eaten two meals at the table (last night and lunch today) and I cleaned up after. both. of. them. There are no dirty dishes on my dining room table. Holy crap, you have no idea how good that feels. It wasn’t even that much of a pain in the ass to move them - honestly, it’s a lot easier to do it now than when there’s gross nasty mold!
I’m in.
First goal: Do laundry - all the way though including putting it away - at least two loads during the week and the rest over the weekend. That way I shouldn’t have mounds of it for the weekend. (2 kids, one helpful husband, three bedrooms, three bathrooms).
If I can keep that up for a week, the next goal is to have the dishes done and kitchen cleaned every night before bed.
Doing the dishes is Himself’s job, and I don’t nag him over whether he does it in the a.m. or immediately after dinner, or if he doesn’t do it perfectly. I’m trying to do the laundry as soon as a hamper is full, but sometimes having time to fold and put away is difficult. I’m trying to turn into a mental nag about putting things where they belong but that’s hard, as I have a mental blindspot to seeing things out of place. Sweeping and mopping happen as and when…I really need to make one of those lists.
I’m in. I have no tips, just more stuff than house. It’s been my goal for awhile to get the house clean enough to sort through some of our boxed up stuff and get rid of crap. First, of course, this means getting rid of crap as I clean to get room for the boxes.
At the moment, I just want clean. I am having a very hard time focusing on writing my thesis when my house is depressing.
Count me in. (And a pox on the FlyLady’s sexism! Us guys need clean too.)
I recently bought a set of new cookware, solid stainess steel with thick copper bottoms, to replace the miscellany of hand-me-downs and garage-sale relics I’d had forever. My first new set of cookware ever! I got them home and unpacked them–oooh! shiny!–and immediately the entire rest of my apartment looked like crap.
I’ve started to clean more regularly, and do my dishes more immediately. Part of the reason for this is that I am making smoothies in the morning and actually have dirty dishes in the morning.
One thing I find oddly satisfying is, before going to sleep, to set out my clothes for the morning. One would think it wouldn’t make that much of a difference, but it does. Some kind of mental thing.
I’m going to hire MollyMaids or someone to clean the bathroom and kitchen to get things rolling, but what I really need is a great simplification of the rest of my apartment. I have half a dozen tottering bookshelves, all full. I have several boxes of miscellany to sort and get rid of. I have four pictures that I want to hang.
And… I have a mound of non-working electronics that I want to get rid of. I’d have to call a junk-removal service, because I don’t want to just toss the stuff in the dumpster–hazardous materials and all that. Also, one of the items is an old laser printer that I bought secondhand from work, the kind of printer that makes all the lights in the apartment dim when it printed a page. It doesn’t work too well. It’s a two-person lift and I want to get rid of it. The mound also contains an old receiver and two monitors that died last year and were replaced.
I want to improve my apartment to get it ready for guests again. Especially a potential female one.
I want to hang art, my own art even, and get orgasnised enough to run a home business. I want to put a fold-down two-person mini-dining-table in the mound’s location. I want better lighting and working conditions. I want a better chair at the computer and at the drawing board.
I’m in. My goal for today is to clean up the kitchen and get the paper junk that has accumulated sorted and filed. Wednesday is theoretically my kitchen-cleaning day, and I’ve been meaning to get that counter cleaned up. This is a large counter area inbetween my kitchen and dining area, and it’s where the phone lives, as well as my housekeeping binder (that I put together 3+ years ago when I was better at this; it needs to be reorganized now). It is one of the worst clutter spots in the house, because I leave junk mail there and everything random accumulates. Every so often I get sick of it and clean it all up, vowing to take better care of it–and two days later it looks just the same.
One problem is that I don’t have to open very much mail at all–our bills show up, but are paid automatically, so I’m supposed to open them, check them, and then file them–but I don’t actually have to pay them. It’s not an activity with a deadline, so I just ignore the piles until they get big enough.
Tomorrow is supposed to be bathroom day, but I’m working, so I’m not sure how that will work. Maybe if I get really ambitious I’ll do it today while I have some momentum, but I don’t know when I’ll have time as we’re supposed to go roller-skating right after lunch, and then we have karate later.
Papa Tiger is much better than I am about some things. For example, I’ll often leave the dinner dishes till later in the evening, whereas he prefers they get done immediately after we eat; so I’ve gotten into the habit of cooperating with him on that. Although when he does them, I usually go in and do some counter/stovetop cleaning afterwards since he does just the dishes.
Likewise with laundry – he was a 46-year-old bachelor when we married, so he was used to doing his own laundry. So we do take turns, sometimes each doing our own, sometimes him doing mine, sometimes me doing his. That’s another area where we usually don’t have difficulty getting it seen to.
The big problem? The actual deeper cleaning. If I don’t clean the toilets, they don’t get cleaned. And we won’t even discuss the rest of the bathroom cleaning. I try to keep the sink in the master bath clean all the time, which is so easy – just a quick wipe down once a day, and voila! And neither of us likes to mop floors or vacuum – although I prefer to do it since Papa T. nearly burned out the vacuum last time he did, thinking for some silly reason that it would stop when it got full (it doesn’t, the motor started choking). And with two large dogs shedding nonstop, it’s not a job we can easily ignore. Not that that stops us, of course…
I love the multi-list idea! I’m so disorganized, that may work very well for me. And I can set up regular reminders on my computer to let me know each morning what today’s tasks are, so I can’t forget to even look at the list!
This is kind of like the 12 Steps of Cleaning!
Before I leave for dance class in an hour and a half I will clean the fridge. I will actually clean it, with real soap and everything. I will also re-start vacuuming and mopping weekly.
I am allergic to putting things away. I need a robot maid.
Here I go fridge-cleaning.
A while ago I decided filing the bills was useless - I almost never went back to the paper copy of the bill. I got myself a tub. I put the years bills in the tub. Most often I open them and look at them - but if I need them, they are in the tub. At the end of the year, put a top on the tub, put it in the basement. Wait a few years, have a bonfire.
Its a work trick - identify the value add - are you getting value from filing? Open them, check for obvious discrepencies, throw in a tub just in case.
(Memo to self - it is mid-January and you don’t have said tub for this year).
Brilliant! Half of the problem in my office is these piles I make of “ought to file that”. Some of it I really ought to file - home warranty stuff, the cats’ adoption papers, etc. but most of it is bills I feel I ought to keep.