Two steps forward, one step back. Repeat. Progress.

There’s nothing like a massive floor overhaul to force me to make a desperate attempt to organize. It never works; it always ends up with me shuffling every little doll shoe and puzzle piece into an old Pampers box and while telling myself that THIS time I’ll remember where this or that is RIGHT here. In the closet. Next to 3 other boxes of little nick-nacks and crap off my counters and book case wherein lies the same whispered promise that I’ll come back soon.

Ha! Really, I have gotten to the point where I laugh at myself anymore during these situations. I whisper sweet nothings to myself such as I’ll come back and look through that box this weekend.

What’s funny is I’m not a pack rat. Not anymore, anyway. (That’s a conversation for another day.) I’m happy to get rid of stuff via the trash or donation, but it’s hard to find the time! I’m very low maintenance, personally. Quite a minimalist these days. (Man, someone around here should be!) Working from home affords me the ability to keep a limited wardrobe for work and no one notices if I pick up my kids from school in the same jeans as the day before. (And if they do, I don’t want to be their friend anyway.)

So yesterday I’m going through a bookcase where I’ve been saving up to five years’ worth of this one little magazine that I really like to read called Guideposts. (Notice I haven’t read any of them since my first kid was born?) I’ve been saving them with the hopes of reading them. I should add that I don’t have any other magazine subscriptions, not that I subscribe to, anyway. My mom sends my kids Highlights and my husband gets a gift subscription to one of the Golf magazines. I don’t care how cheap those subscriptions are, I’m positive that they get money selling your name to a hundred other places and that’s why the subscription fee can be so low. Since I stopped ordering subscriptions, junk mail has practically ceased! The down side is no more Publisher’s Clearing House mail. Awe, shucks. (Not.)

So, I sucked up all the courage I had and put all those magazines in the recycling bin! (Not without tearing off all the address tags to go in the shredder.) That was hard to do AND even harder not to let ADD set in and get sidetracked reading some stories! They’ll keep coming and now I won’t feel like I need to read back issues before delving into the current one. The stories are really touching and I think I’ll read some of them to my kids so they can get a glimpse of life and struggle in the big world (which apparently revolves around them, donchaknow?) I ended up with a bucket of books that got relocated to some shelves downstairs and more papers added to my husband’s box of personal stuff that I keep adding to, yet he never goes through.

I read something recently that really hit home for me. Everything in your house should have a home. A light bulb went on in my head when I read that. THAT right there is my biggest problem! I’m always asking myself why my house is such a pitiful mess when it seems I’m always cleaning?! Because all I’m doing is shuffling crap around in my cupboards and on the counters. Back and forth, round and round. It’s maddening!

But now I am armed with that knowledge and have already made some improvements with my kitchen cupboards (detailed in a future post) and since I made those changes, they remain mostly organized still. My little 3 square feet of counter space that I cleaned last week is still clean. I got it to a maintenance level of clean — my key goal in any of my organizing nowadays. Many things that seemed to have a home on that counter now have a home elsewhere (the toaster and bread box are what remain on that spot).

Like I said, major floor overhaul going on right now. I spent the last two days cleaning & moving crap around and pulling up carpet and vinyl tile. The kitchen, dining, and living areas are a disaster right now with stacked chairs, bare floor, and praying I got up all the 6 billion staples that held down that flooring. (I’m not a fan of flooring installers right now. There’s just absolutely no way that floor needed that many staples. Damn.) I’ll spare you the picture of my blistered hand from my staple yanking fun.

Near future post will entail all the fun I’m having with this renovation.

Cleaning with kids in the house is like brushing your teeth while eating Oreos.

Chipping Away

I figured the only way I can make any headway into my completely unorganized home is to do a little at a time. Otherwise, I just don’t know where to start and I get overwhelmed, and it’s just that much easier to check Facebook, which leads to Buzzfeed, and down…down…down the black hole of the Internet.

It is this mindset that got my eating in order when I found out I had gestational diabetes (GD) when pregnant with my second child. I felt broken and helpless. I definitely had a sweet tooth back then. To work on the cravings, each day I reduced my pasta and bread intake little by little and switched over to Splenda (and have since moved on to Stevia). I worked really hard to keep my blood sugar down. Unfortunately, I still ended up on insulin for the last trimester of the pregnancy, but I vowed to fix myself before I got pregnant again so I wouldn’t get GD again. It worked! There is something like a 75% chance of getting it again in subsequent pregnancies, but I didn’t get it with the following baby.  I would never have accomplished that had I tried to quit sugar and simple carbs cold turkey. No way! Baby steps. (ha ha, punny)

So back to the chipping. My ultimate plan is to have a house that is maintainable. It doesn’t have to be magnificant; I just want processes in place to maintain a nice home ONCE I get there. And an easy process to get it to company-ready should we actually have anyone over. (Can you say introvert?) First I need to get there…one square foot at a time.

I cannot even begin to explain how hard it will be to show before and after pictures, especially the before. yeesh. I will. I promise. It’s been 5.5 years since this house looked anything close to normal. Then I had a baby. He just started walking and I had another. Then she just started walking, while the first was climbing, and I had another. And got my tubes tied, cuz three in diapers is enough. Farkeneugen.

But all three kids are in school now (woohooo!) and though I work full-time from home, I have about a half hour in the morning where there is no one around (or awake, I should say – hubs works dogs [night shift] right now) and I don’t have to sit down and work quite yet (except for deadlines…those bloody life sucking bastards) and I can quickly run through the house and do a quick pickup of toys and pillows (WHY oh why do kids constantly throw pillows on the ground!? It’s maddening!). My upper level bathroom is the one room at maintenance level, so I can just put things away and straighten the towels.  I’m working on devising a list where I have categories of chores: Chores that take 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. Also dividing those by room. I might focus on one room a day or if I feel like spending the half hour to chip away at a counter top or go through mail.

I try to stay away from Pinterest because it can suck me right in and I won’t emerge until hours later, but there are some cool organizing tips on there. I did the tension rod under the kitchen sink thing and it’s working great! But I discovered in the cleaning process that I had 2-3 of everything, so it looks quite stuffed in there still. heh.  Considering I really want to minimize how much crap I have, that felt a little like a step backward. Oh well, onward and upward.

This past weekend I managed to really clean up the dreaded snack corner on my kitchen counter. Only 3 square feet, but an amazing amass of raisins and stale pretzels and long lost bag clips.   There were two empty containers just taking up space. That’s my husband’s way of letting me know we need something – leave the empty container on the counter. (Hey, it’s better than just throwing it in the recycling bin and me not figuring it out until it’s too late.) But in a maddened rush to find some square footage in order to chop some veggies and maybe use the stove top, I probably tossed it into the corner.

It took a solid 2 hours to do just that corner! I have another corner on my counters that is nearly as bad and then the dreaded breakfast bar that I’m sitting at right now. I just look at these counters and my mind goes crazy. Maybe it’s a A.D.D. thing, but it is hard to concentrate on my work when I have this mess staring back at me. It’s a “hotspot” where everyone puts everything and especially me when I’m taking something away from one of the kids, it gets tossed back in the corner, out of their view.

I’m proud of my 3 square foot accomplishment this weekend. I’m looking at it from across the kitchen now and it gives me some peace. And with the school week starting again in the morning, I have hope that the corner will remain “maintained” for the rest of the week.  There’s no hope in doing something like this during the summer when the kids are around! At least I have that much sanity left to realize that.