- Wash the dishes in your sink
- Get your outfit for tomorrow together, including accessories
- Set up coffee/tea/breakfast
- Make your lunch
- Put your keys somewhere obvious
- Wash your face and brush your teeth
- Charge your electronics
- Pour a little cleaner in the toilet bowl (if you don’t have pets or children or sleepwalking adults)
- Set your alarm
- Go to bed at a reasonable hour
It took quite a while, and lots of Doctor Who while I worked, but I cleaned up one of the worst parts of our (very bad) room! AND I made the bed!!!
So, January 14, 2013, my husband and I woke up in our bed to 2 inches of water everywhere in our 1000 square foot condo. One hundred and one days later, we moved back in. Our shit is still everywhere, nothing is organized anymore, and while we have floor space, we’re generally really upset and unsettled by our surroundings. For some reason, I decided yesterday was the day to take the laundry room back. (I am personally of the school of thought that the laundry room should be a nice place so that you like to spend time there. Husband, not so much. But he helped. :D)
Pictures in the galleries are before.
One 20/10 with me in the laundry room, and husband taking boxes that belong else where and unpacking them there (aka, the linen closet and the kitchen linens into the kitchen).
Second 20/10 with my husband hanging our new hanging thingie, and me cleaning off the kitchen table (not pictured).
The pink hook that currently has the pink hand broom is for my daughter’s little broom. As soon as we find it. I’m going to get a 3m sticky hook for her hand broom and dust pan.
Excuses are boring.
Excuses are boring.
- Wash the dishes in your sink
- Get your outfit for tomorrow together, including accessories
- Set up coffee/tea/breakfast
- Make your lunch
- Put your keys somewhere obvious
- Wash your face and brush your teeth
- Charge your electronics
- Pour a little cleaner in the toilet bowl (if you don’t have pets or children or sleepwalking adults)
- Set your alarm
- Go to bed at a reasonable hour
phew!
it’s not 100% clean or organized yet but this looks p good to me! good enough for me to not stress out about it, at least
Before
This is from a few weeks ago:
Very often there are big bags of garbage and recycling in the hallway (which is actually my kitchen). This is despite the fact that the door right there leads out to the mud room where there are proper bins for it.
If there are no bags, this might start to happen, as it did this week:
Luckily I nipped this pile in the bud last night.
And this shit here happens every single week:
Just this second I realized how hilarious this photo is. See the inukshuk in the wee painting? I’ve built my own goddamn inukshuk out of the recycling. Ha!
And that’s the mud room, just beyond the window. Why doesn’t any of this crap make it out there??
Because the mud room usually looks something like this:
The recycling bin is forever overflowing. Look, another inukshuk! You’d think I was hunting caribou or something…
So, work was needed.
After
Yeah, not too different, and the moldy stuff on the wall is really bugging me…but that’s kind of my landlord’s problem.
One of my issues is that here in Toronto we have limits on how much garbage and recycling we can put out at a time. You can pay extra for bags of garbage (which I did this past week in order to clear things out), but not for recycling. It may be another few weeks before all of my recycling is out of here, especially considering how much shredding is out already. But this is real progress. The cart is in the furnace room where it should be, and I swept up a good amount of dead leaves from the floor. And a few spiders.
Best of all, my kitchen-cum-hallway no longer looks like the city dump!
And today I celebrate 12 weeks of DISHES! ALWAYS DONE! AND PUT AWAY!
This week’s challenge: keep up with your dishes. Instead of leaving them around the house, or dropping them in the sink and walking away, this week we’re going to deal with every dish immediately.
If you have a dishwasher, this means putting the dishes in the dishwasher as soon as you’re done using them. If you’re dishwasher-less, this means washing each dish immediately. We’re also remembering the crucial third step of dishes: put it away, goddammit! Once the dishes are clean, they go back in the cabinets/cupboards/drawers.
If you’re cooking a meal, try the “clean as you go” method. Prep dishes get washed while the food is cooking. Pots, pans, and everything else get washed right after the meal.
Dishes, people. You can do this.
This is really embarrassing, but this is a mess that has been building for 15 years. It’s a box of installation CDs. Starting from 1998. And I have not once taken a moment to look through it to see what is still relevant. I remember when I was a kid, being handed these and told, “Don’t lose these or you will DIE, don’t ever throw them away because you might need them and if you don’t have them you will DIE” or something to that effect. But let’s be honest, I don’t need Encarta ‘99 Encyclopedia or most of this stuff. It needs to be sorted.
I’ve been putting this task off for YEARS.
And it only took about 20 minutes to deal with it. That’s some sad procrastination.
Admittedly I did hang on to a couple AOL free trial disks for novelty sake. Maybe someday I’ll show them to my grandkids and be like “This is how we internetted when I was your age.”
Excuses are boring.
- Wash the dishes in your sink
- Get your outfit for tomorrow together, including accessories
- Set up coffee/tea/breakfast
- Make your lunch
- Put your keys somewhere obvious
- Wash your face and brush your teeth
- Charge your electronics
- Pour a little cleaner in the toilet bowl (if you don’t have pets or children or sleepwalking adults)
- Set your alarm
- Go to bed at a reasonable hour
Tonight I had a party.
A few months ago, I realized that I had been meaning to invite some friends over for dinner for almost a year and hadn’t because it seemed too impossible to conceive that I could clean up my place. It took a couple of months to combat the vampiric dustbunnies, the self-propagating boxes, and the assembled forces of darkness, but it was finally reduced enough that it seemed like one last push would get me to a point where it was feasible to have food and wine and as many people as I have chairs crowded around my table.
It wasn’t perfect, certainly not to my mother’s standards of entertaining. There were still some piles of clutter here and there. I massively mistimed the cooking and we ended up eating two hours later than intended. I realized during dinner that I was staring directly at some dirty mugs sitting on my desk. I’m not entirely sure how long they’d been there.But people laughed and the conversation didn’t lag and nobody seemed shocked and horrified that I had forgotten to erase some notes written in dry-erase marker on my bathroom mirror. Because strangely enough, my friends aren’t judgmental monsters setting out to cast me into a pit of despair and shame. They did, in fact, just want me to have a happy birthday. And what do you know, I did.
Even though it’s Sunday.
