This weekend I unfucked my house!
Yesterday over the course of two 20/10s I did 2 loads of laundry, swept my kitchen floor, did dishes, tidied up my living room, and turned my kitchen and living room into neat and clean spaces! My boyfriend even hung up some art on our kitchen wall (which sucks because they are plaster and require drilling and screw anchors) and finally finishing his parking-meter-lamp project. :D
Living room before: worse than it looks, as there are dishes hiding out of sight and LOTS of dust. Notice the parking meter on the table to the right… unfinished lamp of sadness
Living room after: everything has been dusted and the meter now is a real lamp!
Kitchen before: again, there is grime that doesn’t show. The tablecloth was FILTHY omg.
Kitchen after:
Then today, I folded my laundry and ACTUALLY PUT IT AWAY, which prompted me to tackle my hidden corner— the couch in the bedroom I share with my boyfriend. Instead of being a couch, it is 99.9999% of the time a massive pile of clothes that I am too lazy to hang up in the closet. Oops, my bad.
Evidence:
It took me close to 30 minutes to do this one, but I feel so much better about walking into the bedroom now!
After: the bag and jacket belong to my boyfriend :)
BONUS PICTURE
I don’t have a before pic, but our dressers were both covered in a horrific amount of dust and clutter. My boyfriend did a 20/10 of his own and cleaned them off. Voila!
HABITAT: UNFUCKED
I’m not going to say this was easy. I’ve been putting off cleaning my bedroom for…oh, probably six months now. It got to the point where it was so dirty that I slept in my living room for weeks at a time. Eventually I just couldn’t take it anymore, and started cleaning. I spent several afternoons over the past few weekends working on it, and it’s finally done.
Really though, I can’t put into words how much of a relief it is to finally have this room clean. Thanks to UFYH for the inspiration and awesome iPhone app. :)
You can also see my unfucked living room here, and my unfucked kitchen here!
I always find making the bed daunting I AM ONLY LITTLE OKAY.
Nevertheless it does make the room look a little better already. Tidying the crap from the bedside cabinets took all of three minutes. And as a bonus, my fiance hung up a mirror I’ve wanted up for a while. Mr. Owl says ‘Hi’.
EDIT: I’ve had the mirrror up for about 10 minutes, and my cat has knocked my keys and vaseline off my bedside cabinet in a game he calls “chase the kitty reflection”.
Befores and afters of my bedroom. The rest of the house is awesome, too, but this room was so bad to begin with. It’s kind of the dumping ground for whenever I tidy the rest of the house. Laundry is my kryptonite. I wash it and hang it out and bring it in, but then it sits in the basket. sometimes i’ll get enthused and put my stuff away, chucking my kid’s clothes into the spare basket “to put away later”, but it never gets finished. The impetus for this massive clean is an upcoming inspection, and i decided to shampoo the carpets. so i needed everything off the floor. My boy has daycare only on monday, AND I woke up with some nasty gastro business. I spent the whole day sick as fuck and shampooing that damn floor. then we stayed at mum’s so the floor could dry (with a lot of furniture on our beds, lol.)
Today was the day for the bedroom. I wasn’t looking forward to it because I knew it was going to involve many, many trips out the trash, but tomorrow morning is garbage pick up, so it had to be done.
Before:
And After:
It’s not perfect. I have to keep reminding myself that I am not striving for perfection. Perfection will never happen, and trying to get it just makes me procrastinate more and get more and more depressed. Perfection is a myth. My new goal is Not Covered in Crap. I can do that.
I had a day off before work and couldn’t stand the state of my room anymore. I was feeling pretty sick this week, so I kept doing a few minutes of cleaning here and there, but my ability to make messes seems to be much stronger than my ability to organize. With many breaks and lots of iced tea, I was able to get my room in order by mid-morning. I wasn’t worn out so I ironed my clothes for tomorrow and made another pitcher of tea. Then when my roommate got home, we started decorating the apartment for Halloween! It was an awfully successful day :)
So my friend showed me this “Unfuck Your Habitat” thing, so I decided to give it a go.
I’m excited to work on the rest of the house. I’ve got most of the living room, the kitchen and major parts of the bedroom to do yet, but I’ve taken “before” pictures of all of them. The real difficulty will be getting John/Mike (boyfriend/roommate) to help out, too.
The dresser is still a bit cluttered, but we don’t have a lot of surface area for that kind of thing. :/
I own a lot of books, like literally thousands. On a good day, I can go through about four small ones. When I was younger, I bought $5 worth of books every week from a local bookstore that sold them for 5 and 10 cents each. You do the math.
Since I have so many books, I own a lot of bookcases too. I try to keep only a small selection in my bedroom, but lately it has gotten a little out of hand. Oh, and did I mention I collect dolls? Yeah, they took up space on the bookcases too, adding to the chaos.
Pics under the cut.
Did nothing all afternoon, so I decided to unfuck my habitat :D
1. Desk
This was a no-brainer really. Done in 20 mins.2. Shelf
Another no-brainer. 3 mins.3. Storage area
Wiped the containers and put bags of stuff on top, so I can mop the floor.4. Floor
This is the big one. 45 mins. Cleaned and put away bags, plastic bags. Wiped all the books and mags. Put stuff away in 20 different places, but where they belong.5. Things lost now found
Purple pen, 4B pencil, New Testament Bible (lost since Lent), blue scrungie and S$1.15. Heehee!Dear UfYH, can I have a Hit Girl gif please?
So I’ve been very slowly picking away at this for a week or so now. A little here, a little there. It’s one of those rooms that I always want to do…
Okay, first of all, my room does not usually look this bad. I was in the middle of trying to sort some things out in my closet when I realized I should have taken a before photo of my room. Usually there are sheets on my bed. Admittedly usually the clothes on the bed are on the floor ;)
But (!) Check THIS out:
The first thing I did was take the hated mirrored closet doors off. I’ve been wanting to do that since I moved in last September. I’ve had the curtains to hang in their place since about December. I’m not totally happy with A) the fact I didn’t iron them before hanging them and B) the spring rod situation, but yay for no more horrid mirrored doors. Figure I can iron them out when I replace the rod.
And behind the curtains?
Okay, clearly I need to go through and get rid of some stuff because the amount of clothing in there is ridiculous but I’m in a place right now where I need to hang on to a range of sizes. I did weed out the things that are too big (save for a block of t-shirts I like to walk in). But! The t-shirt thing is new, the shoe rack is new, that shelf with all those handbags (and yes, that shelf is 95% ALL handbags… some ladies have a shoe problem, I have a t-shirt, handbag, hat problem) is all pretty and organized (larger bags I use for beach/concert/farmer’s market/day trips, etc. are in an organizer in my office closet). I bought all those organizers forever ago at the Container Store (um, hello wonderful place!), it was nice to use them finally.
As for the rest of the room? It’s VERY girlie, which surprises a lot of my friends, but I do love it so….
I love my awesome glass tray table. I bought it at a barn sale years ago. You’re really supposed to use it for serving as the glass top doubles as a tray. I use it to rotate out postcards I love/have received. I’m also sort of a post-card whore.
Okay, the cat-trees aren’t the prettiest, but clearly the kitties enjoy them.
So there it is. Completely unfucked, totally organized, so incredibly clean and tidy. And I’m absolutely going to keep it that way. Sheesh! I even steam-cleaned the carpet!
*I’m going to preface this by saying that I hate messes. I’m quite a bit of a germaphobe so I realize my before pictures are disgusting and I’m glad I’m not living like that anymore. That being said:
On top of having the most stuff out of all my family members living in my house, I got stuck with the smallest room. Keeping things organized has always been somewhat of a challenge. My bedroom was long overdue for a cleaning but due to my busy schedule and general feelings of lousiness I had little inspiration. Thanks to UFyH’s unique approach to tidying up, however, I cleaned my room easily and relatively quickly.
Yes I still sleep with a teddy bear, it’s my fiancé’s and we’re long distance… don’t judge me.Probably my favorite part about my room being cleaner is that I get to come home every day to a clean, made bed. It may not seem like much but it helps me relax faster.
This also may not seem like much but just to dust these shelves, go through everything and know that I use everything on them it has made my room that much more comfortable and easy to find things in.
Shelves, part 2. And a few afterthoughts/tips:
- I created a chore-chart for myself (yes, like I’m a six year old, I even have star shaped stickers and everything) to remind myself of chores that often go way too long without being done (such as vacuuming, remembering to do my laundry before I run out of matching clothes to wear, or washing my sheets). I know it may be infantile but it helps me stay on top of things and you know what, getting a star makes me feel good about myself so fuck off.
- For dusting, use a dryer sheet to pick up dust. They grab it better than most cleaning products I’ve used that were advertised for that purpose, and they smell nice too.
- Watch Hoarders while cleaning. Seriously, you will feel much better about your own small mess while watching someone clean eight foot high walls of garbage.
- NO MARATHONS. I probably never would have done this if I tried to do it all at once. Take your time, you’ll be much happier in the end.
I found the Unfuck Your Habitat Tumblr and I am…obsessed. I’m totally using it, but I wanted to share my previous bedroom unfucking success as a reminder of what I need to keep up. (Okay, and I’d also really like an Avengers gif.) This was mainly done in small bursts, with one marathon day and a helpful friend to take things out, deep clean around them and rearrange.
Before:
It’s a little — okay, a LOT embarrassing. But now? SO MUCH BETTER.
In addition to the cleaning and re-arranging, I painted my Ikea furniture and added decorative paper to the plastic fronts, plus new handles. I also added more shelving and, you can just see in the corner, some hooks for scarves and things. I’d still like to do a bit more decorating but for now — I declare success!
palmtopxtiger Asks:
unfuckyourhabitat Said:
Weekly, please! With hot water. Dust mites and other gross stuff like to hang out on sheets. Especially if it’s warm at night.
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I have to admit, it was harder than I thought. Not physically - picking things up off the floor isn’t exactly strenuating. But emotionally and mentally. Actually digging into what I allowed my life to become - that was hard. A couple of times I had to just stop and cry. (The fact that B has decided to pull one of his disappearing acts during all this unfucking didn’t help any, but there wasn’t/isn’t a fucking thing I can do about that.) But after a couple of minutes of crying, I got stuck back into it.
The 15 year old came and helped me a little bit toward the end, and the cat decided to come keep us company as well.
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But after roughly 2 hours of working (I didn’t actually time myself with 20/10’s or 45/15’s, I just worked for a bit, stopped, then worked some more - maybe one day I’ll get into the habit of timing myself, but this was just day 1), this is what I have:
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Look! Floor! And that big stuffed bag is laundry - I don’t actually have anywhere to put it yet. The small bag against the wall (well ok, they’re the same sized bags but… you know what I mean, Vern?) is stuff I’m getting rid of. What you don’t see is the one huge bag of garbage I also got rid of, as well as a small box filled with B’s things I don’t even want to mention, that I had the 15 year old take straight out to the bins outside.
It’s not a lot of progress, but it IS progress. Tomorrow I shall tackle some more, working my way right towards the wardrobe. For now, I’m just happy that I managed to do something and you can actually TELL I did it.
(Originally written 18/05/02 at 7 p.m.)
So I was scrolling through Tumblr while I ate dinner, and a post popped up on my dash from unfuckyourhabitat. It’s a blog I followed weeks ago that I absolutely love - like FlyLady, without the simpering cutesiness (fuck it, that’s a word now) that I’ve come to loathe. The post read thus:
Off your ass!Go clear off the surface of your coffee table, end table, or kitchen counter. Don’t have any of those? Go clear off your dresser top or nightstand. You can come back in 10 minutes.
Up.
Off your ass.
Ready?
Set?
Unfuck.
My first thought? “Fuck you, lady.”
My second thought? “Okay, that was rude. I should probably do it as an apology.” So then this happened.
If I had feelings, they might be hurt! Great job, though!
