Housekeeping Techniques

We are now far enough into the school year to assess how successful my summer projects were. Hard to believe it's been three months since I last posted about The Purge. I even have one last post about my closet languishing in draft.

On the whole the summer was a mixed bag. On the one hand, I am super pleased with my cleaned laundry room. I love walking into the room and knowing nothing is going to fall. The bookcase is not going to throw things at me. I don't have to contort myself with the laundry basket to make it across the room. It is a solid win. Also my closet is great. Spoiler from yet to be published post: I purged clothes, trashed a pile of stuff, and reorganized the school supplies. I can actually walk to the back on the closet. I can hang clothes without stepping over and standing on a pile in the floor. Again, this is outstanding.

However, on the other hand, this is not what I spent most of the summer doing. I spent the vast majority of the summer digging out the pit that is the upstairs. On this front, it's hard not to feel like I wasted so much time. Nothing is as bad as when I started in June, but nothing is clean anymore either. There's still too much up there. The children dump and walk away and then dump more on top. It's too difficult to keep them out of the unpurged boxes and so it all gets mixed back together.

I knew when I chose--and I did choose--to walk away from the upstairs and clean my closet, this would likely be the result. It just took so long to get everything organized, I had severe decision fatigue being upstairs, and I needed to get away from that stuff. This decision fatigue is probably why it was so difficult and took so long to clean out my closet. It's very mentally taxing to have to make decisions over and over and over. That sounds stupid to say, but it's true. Nevertheless, I needed to complete some project that was under my control to maintain and not subject to the sweet mercies of children. 

That's the summer recap: trying not to despair over all I didn't get done and trying not to think about the fact that next summer I will actively need babysitting again in order to work and probably won't get much of it. (I don't even know how to find a daytime babysitter that isn't a daycare.) But I am super happy about my closet and the laundry room.

Anyway. So I realized something about my housekeeping style this week. I may not get everything put away, but if the surface is clean, I will not pile. If I leave an item out that ought to be put away, it may look like I have forgotten about it, but I have not forgotten about it. I see it and WILL NOT put anything on top of it. If I should need the surface, I will put the stray item away. However if several things are piled up, it moves mental categories from 'simple task' to 'project.' Projects are mentally intimidating so projects get procrastinated. The problem arises that, since I do not live by myself, other people see the stray item as an invitation to pile. A table I have cleaned off quickly gets overrun while the item at the bottom is something easy to put away. I don't have wider lessons to draw here. I only noticed when I am likely to pile and when I don't. Maybe I should always put everything away every time, but that's not how life works.

The Purge, Part 7

It occurs to me at this late date I should have subtitled all these posts. Oh well.

Okay, so this probably wasn't a great idea for getting all the things done I want done, but the truth is I never expected it to take as long as it did. I thought a couple hours one afternoon and then I would move on to greater heights. How wrong I was.

What am I talking about?

I purged my hanging clothes. I thought it would be easy. It was not easy.

When last we met here, I had cleaned the laundry room and decided the obvious next step was to clean the upstairs bathroom and purge a few toy bins. It made sense to prioritize a few smaller tasks to make housekeeping maintenance easier. However my motivation for those particular tasks was low. After spinning my wheels for several days, I decided it was stupid to let time slip by while procrastinating the things I did not want to do, and I should do another large task that I wanted to do. I looked towards my closet, which has been a source of crammed, wrinkled angst, and thought I will purge my clothes this afternoon. And so I began.

After I got all my clothes out of the closet, I realized I had probably made a big mistake. This job was going to take more than an afternoon.

Let us catalog all the ways purging your closet is not a fun activity:

• How do you try on clothes while wearing a baby? You don't.

• How do you decide if you like the item you tried on while the baby screams on the floor? You can't.

• How do you know if this shirt is still relatively fashionable when you absolutely remember wearing it just a few years ago? Or maybe that was a decade ago? When *did* I last wear this?

• How do you figure out if these pants are worth keeping even though they don't fit right now, but will probably fit in six months? Maybe? Unless the slowest possible weight loss while still being able to detect weight loss rate of a pound every six weeks stops altogether. What *do* I do with this pile of pants? 

• How do you decide which old favorites to let go because they have seen better days while suppressing the urge to re-imagine them as quilts? Even though you don't sew!

• How do you keep from imagining possible scenarios of use for every single item you find?

• How do you decide between this shirt and that similar shirt? Or if you should keep the skirt that has no matching shirt but you love it? Or if this shirt in the great color that should be cute but maybe the cut looks odd on you is worth the closet space? Or maybe the cut doesn't look odd? Maybe it's your own perception? How do you know?!?

• How do you make these decisions without some person, knowledgeable about the issues and sympathetic to the cause, sitting there metaphorically patting you while listening to you natter on like a neurotic?

• How do you even meet people willing to do that? How might I acquire one? 

• How does Facebook decide that you shouldn't even have access to the virtual world of advice by helpfully refusing to show your pleas for assistance to more than single digit numbers of people in groups with dozens of members?

Where was I?

Oh yes, the closet. 

After a long and cranky week in which my clothes were spread all over the downstairs in ginormous piles and several existential crises, I filled an entire diaper box overflowing with discards from my clothes closet. 

After. Yes, I know it looks almost exactly the same as the before, but it's different. Believe me, it's different.

I probably didn't purge enough, but I did the best I could. Now on to the rest of the closet! Surely it won't take more than a few days, right? 

I have two weeks now before school has to start. I want the kitchen reorganized. I know for certain that large job will not happen when my attention turns to school so it has to happen soon. I also have to organize all the school books and, um, plan the school year. I am also teaching a music class twice a month to three different age groups. The room to procrastinate that little planning task is shrinking fast. A complication is that outside obligations are beginning to take their slices of time since pretty much everyone else around here has started school.

As a result, my room is probably not going to be touched, but if the closet is made functional, I might be able to work on my room in fits and starts after school is in full swing. After I finish the closet, I will move to the kitchen. The end of the summer is in sight. 

Ella, chewing furniture

The Purge, Part 6

After last week's hormonally induced panic and a conversation about a rejiggered schedule, it has been decided that Algebra has to start on time, which is Aug 20th, but every thing else and all the other students can wait until after Labor Day. I am trying to take the wise housekeeping advice that a clean house makes schooling more efficient. It is against my nature to prioritize in such a way, but I'm trying. So I still have another month and suddenly the mental block against the laundry room organization evaporated.

The laundry room serves several purposes. First it is the, um, laundry room. It isn't big enough to store anything more than the active laundry, but I need places to collect dirty kitchen towels and cleaning rags and store laundry sundries.** It is also the most easily accessible bathroom for guests. It is also home to a bookcase that stores most of the arts and craft supplies, the kitchen tablecloths, and some books.

I jumped into the cleaning on a whim. I'm not sure what happened. I started picking collected junk off the dryer and then before I knew it, I was outside spraying bins out with the hose. Because of the unforeseen nature of the cleaning job, I don't have any true before pictures. But here are a few kinda before pictures:

The machines didn't take all that long. I wiped up the collection of sticky, congealed laundry detergent and the lint. I cleaned out all the bins, some of which had wandered to the garage, with soap and the garden hose. Why the garden hose? Well, the reason the bins fell out of use is that we had a mouse. Mice poop. The bins were moved, but not cleaned. Disaster ensued. The laundry area, spiffied up:

Between the toilet and the washing machine, the red bin is for collecting dirty kitchen towels. I wish I had a pole for letting them air out but I don't. On top of the dryer, the left blue bin is for laundry supplies. The right blue bin is for collecting cleaning rags. My goal is to do a weekly load of rags to keep us in the cleaning mode.

After the laundry area was complete, I turned to the disaster of the bookcase. So much stuff crammed in there. So little room for sorting.

I broke down science and craft kits. Please, people, no more kiddie kits from Target. I tested markers. I sorted crayons. Why is it hard to throw away broken crayons? The problem with purging and organizing is that success is defined by forcing myself to go against my natural inclinations. There must be something to be done with crayon bits, right? No. No, there's not.

Here are my bags of collected beeswax Advent candles. I am going to meltdown and repour those candles one fine day. It might be years from now, but it will happen.

Let's dissect the above picture. This is me sitting on the floor between the toilet, a stool, the sink, the bookcase, and a trash bag sorting a variety of objects with Ella asleep on my back while I listen to a podcast. Both of my legs are asleep in this picture and I am in no small agony. Nevertheless I persisted.

After 2.5 days of work and a 13 gallon trash bag crammed full, the clouds parted, angels sung, and my laundry room was again functional. Nothing will crash onto your head when you take something off the bookcase.

I moved the loose leaf school paper into a bin and the drawing paper into a bin. The construction paper, which has always had its own box, was moved back onto the bookcase. I consolidated most of the kits into quart freezer bags inside a different bin. There is a crayon box, a chalk box, a marker box, and a colored pencil box. Long may they all be separated. There is even enough room, I think, to move some remnants of art supplies that are in the closet under the stairs to this bookcase. If this is true, it will be amazing.

As for the housekeeping portion of the bookcase, I need to buy another bin to put the tablecloths. This bin will live underneath the school paper bin. I also need to take the sides off of those two clementine crates on the shelf. One of those crates will hold clean handtowels for easy replacement in this bathroom. The other will hold clean rags for cleaning this bathroom. This system is going to work great!

(A small lament for clementine boxes. Where have they gone? It's been several years since I have found them in the grocery. They have been pushed out by those upstart California Cuties, which come in a stupid plastic mesh bag. Has anyone seen any genuine Spanish Clementines lately?)

My next task will be to clean this bathroom--I mean disinfect clean, not organize clean--and then clean the upstairs bathroom. After these two bathrooms are clean, my dear children will have a daily bathroom job so that maybe we will never be embarrassed by dirty bathrooms again.

After the bathrooms are set up, I will return to the toy purge. And then ?probably? my bedroom. I have two solid weeks for cleaning. Then I will take a week on the kitchen, hoping a week is all it takes. Then I will plan out the school year. It's going to happen.




**I love the word sundry. It aptly describes so much in this house.

The Purge, Part 5

The schedule of July has had me dragging out the bonus room work for weeks. A week of swimming lessons plus an additional week of dual session VBS commuting meant work upstairs never continued for long before duty called elsewhere. We are still swimming and walking and softballing too. 

Ella and I walking the church parking lot waiting for the evening edition of VBS to end.

The bonus room is not extremely functional. Like most rooms in this house, it functions as a glorified hallway. Since the upstairs bedrooms are small, I strive to keep most of the toys out of them. (That's the goal, anyway. You saw how well that worked in practice. Oh well. Try, try again.) A consequence of keeping the toys out of the bedrooms is that the bonus room is the official designated toy room. It is the hallway to the bedrooms AND the playroom, but wait, wait, there's more! It also has to function as an office space. Because of all these different functions, the bonus room is going to have to be completed in stages. 

The first stage of bonus room cleaning is getting the toys and sundry in order, which means in all these pictures, pay no attention to anything that looks like office stuff. Yes, I see the piles of boxes full of papers and the desktops piled high, and the bookcases in total disarray. I know it's there, but I am not getting to that part right now.

So, the before. This room is terrible, but it isn't quite as terrible as it looks. Just a couple of weeks, the children got all their sleeping bags out and then didn't get them put away--mostly because the bags went on the top shelf in the girls closet, but the short people could not get a stool in there because the floor was unfindable. That particular problem has been fixed. All that to say, a lot of what is piled on the couch was easily put away in a handful of minutes after the girls' room had been cleaned out. 

But still. It's pretty terrible. It has been ignored for a long while. A major problem in this room is that previous cleaning attempts by people who are not me have involved shoving a bunch of crap indiscriminately into boxes, making a neat pile of the boxes, and declaring the room clean. Then in short order a child, looking for something particular, dumps out several boxes until she finds the object of her desire. The other contents of those boxes may be spread around or shoved back in the box or shoved into a different box. The essential organizational structure of toy storage died an ugly death.

The approach I took in tackling this room was to first designate different storage boxes, whether canvas or plastic, for different kinds of items and then sort every free-floating item in the room into these containers while throwing away lots of junk and trash. After all the free-floating stuff was sorted, I then sorted box after box of doom and chaos into appropriate locations while still trashing more junk.

All of this was very slow work because I never got to work for very long stretches. As I cleared a box, I stacked it in the corner out of the way. I am amazed at all the empty containers.

I honestly haven't done a lot of purging of toys yet, beyond junk and trash, because I felt like I needed to get like together with like before I could make any decisions. The one area I did purge out is the dress up clothes. We have entirely too much and they take up so much room. I had to get rid of some of it in order to make room for storing other toys. 

There isn't much to say here about process. I sorted and sorted. I ended up filling three diaper boxes full of giveaway items and a giant 30 gallon black trashbag. I eventually I vacuumed. Here is Ella in the carrier, while I vacuum out the very crumby couch. 

I am thinking about adding a bookcase or cubby something in this spot where the plastic bins are stacked. Any thoughts? I know we have too much furniture for the space in the house, but are low on bookcase space. 

For your amusement, I once tried to bring the playpen upstairs by myself without breaking it down, which did not end well. I watched Dave do it multiple times so I could do it too, right? Um, no.

Yes, it's stuck. Or at least stuck for short people.

At long last, after more than two weeks of work in short spurts, the toy area of the bonus room has been cleared, sorted, and organized.

Yes, I am sitting comfortably on the orange couch.

I still have a box of puzzles to make sense of and all the games, but I had to stop because I was suffering from decision fatigue. I am delaying actually purging out the toy categories until after I do a few other tasks because of the decision fatigue.

After this area was completed, I moved on to clothes sorting, but I didn't take any pictures because really, clothes in plastic bins. I have sorted two sizes, have one more to go, and am well on my way to filling another diaper box of giveaways. This is just the clothes that over overflowed our storage bins, not the clothes in the children's dressers. That's another day. And later today I will be going to my town's biannual consignment to buy Even More (redacted) Clothes! Because even though we have many overflowing bins of clothing, we don't have all the sizes necessary. Such is life. 

There it is. Stage One of the bonus room complete.  I am undecided if I should return to the bonus room to purge toy categories next or if I should move on to my bedroom. This will be, of course, after recleaning the living room again. Because if I have learned anything, it's that the living room needs to be redone after every project in any other room. 

The Purge, Part 4

At long last the week arrived. The children were all gone. Well, not all the children were gone. I had exactly one lonely Ella with whom to contend. She spent the week quite fussy in the suddenly silent house. Now the moment of truth arrived where I would face down the dragon of the girls room. 

This room hasn't been cleaned with any urgency since the Darwins visited our humble abode for an overnight back in 2015. Even then there was a lot of artful hiding rather than true organization. This time, I wanted to sort and organize and clean in earnest.

Here is how the room looked before I started, but I cannot call them before pictures. You see, when I cleaned out Sam and Marian's room the previous week, the older girls felt something move within them and decided maybe living in a trash heap was not an ideal situation. They brought in a 30 gallon garbage bag and filled it half full with detritus, found all their dirty laundry and put it in a basket to be washed, and located fifty, yes FIFTY, stray dirty socks whose matches lived in the stray sock bag. Thus the room in these pictures, believe it or not, is noticeable cleaner than it might have been a week prior. 

So there it is. Weep with me.

Honestly, taking on this room was psychologically challenging. I was hoping to have already been finished with it before the children left for Grandma's for the week.  I knew I would run across items that would require consultation. There are so many papers that looked like trash to me. I didn't want to throw away some treasure, but I also needed a lot of these papers gone. 

Every day I entered this room with my headphones on, wearing a baby, armed with a garbage bag. 

Occasionally I would convince baby to spend some time in the play pen. Inexplicably, I did not take any pictures of these magic moments, but here is the corner of the play pen, which took up a large portion of the open space of the room. I pulled the nightstand out into the next room in order to make room for the playpen.

It took me three entire work days to pull all the stuff out of all the places. If there was a spot where a paper (or sock or chapstick or barrette or tiny something) could be shoved, it was definitely full of stuffs. Oh, the garbage I found. It looked as if entire bags of candy had been eaten while the wrappers were tossed thoughtlessly to the floor. I do not understand. I am not strict with candy. They eat candy probably four days a week. My only real rule is that they do not take food--any food--upstairs. And yet candy wrappers were shoved under every available surface in failed clandestine attempts. 

So how did I pass the time as I worked? Back when I was working in an office, I listened to many, many podcasts, but since I have been home, my opportunity for listening has been extremely limited. I took the opportunity to fire up all the back episodes from Catholic in a Small Town. I yelled out in horror as Katherine announced she is now commuting over an hour each way to work in Atlanta. Noooooo. Don't do this on purpose!!!! I am now caught up to April and am waiting with bated breath to see how this is going to turn out. Will Kat say, "Take this job and shove it?" Stay tuned.

Once I got everything cleaned out, I had so many piles to sort. I had intended in the beginning to sort into piles as I pulled all the stuff out of all the places. I began strong, but I soon lost the motivation. So many piles. So many places. So much stuff. I eventually began tossing items in the general direction of where I thought it might end up. The decision fatigue was setting in hard. This is where I profess my love for Legos because I know exactly what to do with a Lego. It goes in the Lego box. 

As I sorted the giant piles, I listened for a while to the memorial service for John Ward on YouTube. Ah, John Ward. How can I ever explain it? He was the voice of my childhood. We listened before we could ever see it. Before cable sports, there was the Vol Radio Network and always John Ward telling us what happened. You think your radio guy was the best, but you're wrong because John Ward was the best. THE BEST. It was sad realizing no one in my house could possibly understand. 

Eventually, I whittled the piles down to reasonable. I purchased a paper box for each child which they will be allowed to keep their papers in. All papers in the box. All paper outside the box must be trash, right? 

After five long working days and a full grocery bag of trash to accompany each day, the room was ready to be vacuumed. Vacuuming took a long time. I vacuumed under every surface. I even moved the bed.

I had to vacuum a literal pile of dirt. A potted plant fell a long time ago. I am not sure when. Years may have passed. I really don't know. The vacuum had to be emptied three times as I vacuumed this room.

Finally, the room was finished. Really finished. It isn't perfect. I did not sort shoes or drawers or books. Yet it is so, so, so much better than before. The afters:

 

When the girls arrived back home, they were so excited and even grateful. I think they were paralyzed by the mess and did not know how to fix it. We talked about practicing the habits that will keep the room clean. These habits will be strongly reinforced in the next few weeks and I certainly hope I never have to spend five days cleaning out this room ever, ever again. 

Next up: the bonus room. It's sadly not much better than the girls' was. 

The Purge, Part 3

School ended about two weeks ago and the housecleaning has begun in earnest. Except not really. Between my swimming attempts and so many doctor's appointments--Marian got five shots and didn't even cry, but those eyes got pretty wide by the end--and other obligations, I have only just begun. The thank yous I said I would do before I started cleaning aren't finished either. I decided to take a write a little, clean a little approach. Also the week my children are gone on vacation to my parents' house has arrived and I am nowhere near working on the kitchen. That's the way it goes. It always takes longer than you ever expected.

Anyway, on to the first room! Well, the first official room. The first room was actually the living room, which had descended into a bit of squalor by the end of the school year, but is always in a semi-messy state so it doesn't really count even though it did take a bit of time.

The first official room is Sam and Marian's bedroom. The befores:

So there it is.  Yes, Marian, age 5, still sleeps in a crib. Yes, we have a bunk bed that has boxes of clothes in need of sorting and suitcases on top instead of a mattress. Baby steps. 

Even though I am calling this part of The Purge, this is not the part where I purge. My strategy in the bedrooms is to get all the toys that do not belong out of the room, pick up the trash, and create a little bit of order. The real purge will happen in the room adjacent to the bedrooms, but again, baby steps. 

There is not much to say about process here. Ella enjoyed her stint in baby jail, AKA Marian's crib. 

I filled two grocery bags worth of garbage in this little room. Does everyone's children take scissors to cut paper into little pieces of confetti to sprinkle all over their floors? Just mine? In the course of clearing the floor, I moved the pile of stuffed animals and discovered a half filled black trash bag. Who? Why? How long?

This discovery did lead me to develop a new theory of garbage collection. 

I am about to reveal one of my neuroses to you. I feel guilty about throwing away garbage bags that are not full. Isn't it wasteful to under-utilize a bag? I should not throw it away until it is full, even if it takes a few days because then I am not wasting space or plastic.  I am being efficient with my supplies.

This, friends, is nuts. 

My new theory is that I should throw away the bag at the end of every session, even if--gasp--it is not full. My peace of mind in guaranteeing the removal of garbage is worth more than the efficient use of the never-ending supply of free plastic bags from the grocery store. I have learned through hard won experience that if you don't throw out that half-full bag, the children will helpfully redistribute the garbage for you or, inexplicably, pile their stuffed animals on top of it. What's sad is that I really had to come to terms with this idea. 

So in addition to my two full grocery bags of trash, I threw out the buried 30 gallon bag that had been sitting at the bottom of a pile for an unclear amount of time. Small victories. 

And behold, after two days of work, the results:

It's not perfect. I need to put hooks behind the door so their bags have a place to go. The top of the bunk bed still has suitcases and boxes of clothes that need better homes. (The clothes are in line to be sorted after the upstairs toy room is purged. Maybe?) The stuffed animal solution of cramming them all into that one laundry basket is not great. Maybe I should get a second basket? Trying to get the children to part with any of them is like pulling teeth. I have dusted nothing, and I need a solution for their personal papers so that they don't get spread all over the house. But it is a good start.

The next room is the big girls' bedroom, which is a horror. A horror. Wish me luck!