unfucked my nightstand (again) I really need to put.things.away.every.day :/
BOOM! UfYH strikes again ~ Master closet edition.
I love my closet. It is awesome. It is a freaking room with a window and shelves and dressers and just lovely.
And I have abused and neglected it. I had not done a serious seasonal rotation/purge-out in about 5 years. So this is 1 day and one evening of 20/10s of major purgings that resulted in:
- 4 bags of clothes to donate
- 3 bags of handbags to donate
- 1 bag of hangers to donate
- 1 bag of trash
- 4 handbags to list on eBay
- 6 gazillion BPAL imps & vials to list on eBay
I feel like a rockstar.
Check out that scarf storage in the 2nd after pic — I AM A CLEVER MONKEY. 24” towel bar + 24 shower hooks = perfect scarf storage. TA DA!
Best of all is coming home, and jumping into my pjs and knowing it is super easy now to keep everything this clean and organized.
I meant to post these ages ago, but my old computer kept crashing every time I tried. Now that I have a new computer, I thought I’d go ahead and finally post them.
About a month ago or so, a couple that I know were moving and in desperate need of boxes. Offhandedly, I mentioned that we had a bunch of boxes leftover from our own move from about 3 years ago. They were very excited about the prospect of getting said boxes from us, plus I was excited about getting rid of all the ones we could. See, until then many of the boxes were just stacked in the guestroom in piles nearly 6 feet in height. It’s a room we never use, so they’d accumulated there over time as we unpacked. And it became a room that had a mess I wished to ignore.
Anyway, my friends were coming by the next evening, so I decided to just bite the bullet and dig in and break down as many of the boxes as I could. I can’t remember about many 20/10s total I did that day, but after about 5 hours of working with a few breaks here and there, I cleared out most of the room (and they got a ton of boxes off us)!
As you can see in Before Pic #1, the view walking in was almost nothing but boxes. The entire open area to the left was packed with boxes and even the bed (yes, there’s a bed buried in there!) was covered with them. In the end, it is still not finished. There is stuff still on the shelves I need to sort, some small boxes on the bed (I only gave them mostly medium to big-sized boxes, but I did sort the smaller ones left by size and organized them neatly on the bed for now) that I need to get to the curb to throw out, and the table (see After Pic #3) which has the GIANT pillow and crate on top as well as the bags of clothes for Goodwill (that has previous been underneath in front of the bed — see Before Pic #4) underneath. It’s not perfect, but it is a big improvement.
Depression for months has made tasks like this quite challenging, but I thank #unfuckyourhabitat for the daily inspiration to at least try to do things a little bit at a time.
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.
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!
Before
And after!
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.”
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.
So, out of my six surfaces, I got the kitchen counters done. I was unfucking after cooking dinner (and lunches for work), and I just kept going! Before:
After:
Before (the stovetop and counters were FILTHY):
After:
Yay!
This is the desk when I started. I’ve been trying to keep it neater than the last craft area by having my computer on the same desk. So, if I want access to my computer, I have to keep the crafting in check.
But I still have a ton of finished/half-finished/random craft supplies, plus dishes, paper work, and other fun things.
This is after the 5 20/10’s it took to get everything cleared off. I even dusted. I’m trying to remember to reset everyday, but since this is my most used space, it is super hard for me.
Bonus surface: The little craft storage cart.
I didn’t think to take a before shot, as I was not planning on cleaning it, but I ended up using it as a staging area for the desk, so it got cleaned off too.
I enjoy cleaning, I really do. Unfortunately, when I get busy (as I often am), cleaning falls to the bottom of my list of priorities. Now that it’s summer and I have free time again, it was time to face my disgustingly neglected bathroom.
Just a little over an hour of scrubbing, and my apartment finally feels live-able again! I unfucked my bedroom yesterday too, but I forgot to take photos of that.
BEHOLD THE UNFUCKERY.
I started with the sink…
The toilet was the worst part. Ugh.
The bathtub took some major scrubbing. My back is sore!
My oh-so-mature friends recently had a drunken blast writing all over my mirror whenever they used my bathroom. Cute, but I decided it was time for a change.
And finally, I swept, mopped, and scrubbed the floor…
Bam! Unfucked!
As always, gotta give a shout-out to team unfuck your habitat for motivating me to get off my ass and do something! I feel better now.
I lost count of the 20/10s it took to get here, mainly because laundry takes forever, so these pictures are spread out over 4 days. And it was depressing because it had taken such a huge effort to clean the living/dining areas. But I wasn’t able to make any headway in my bedroom with my laundry. There wasn’t enough space to sort. But I made it happen. I can’t even believe I did it. Insurmountable. That’s the phrase I would have used to describe my house 3 months ago. But here I am master of my totally adorable house. Unashamed to bring people in again. You wouldn’t think laundry could make you emotional, but those after pictures are impossibly joyful for me
For some perspective, my boyfriend and I are in the military which is pretty much a full time job and then some, so by the time both of us get home (I work 9 hour shifts on my feet all day he works 12’s straining his eyes in front of a computer screen) we are all but exhausted and unmotivated to do anything, which makes our apartment turn into this…
All of those fast food soft drinks are there because we can’t be bothered to cook half the time because he has no idea what he’s doing in the kitchen and cooking is literally my job yeah you get the idea…
when I do manage to get the energy to cook and finish eating its nearly bed time so I put the rest of my energy into getting ready for bed…
more kitchen joy!
the bathroom always seems to be a hot mess because the only time I find myself in there is when I’m getting ready for work at 4 am or when I’m showering or taking a dump…
Obviously it was a complete disaster and something needed to be done. The tipping point was when we realized there was a leak in the hallway and it wasn’t from the ceiling so we had to call in maintenance. It turned out to be boyfriend who snapped and dragged me out of bed to fix our problem before they came. Here are the results of 5 hours of teamwork! (with the occasional stop at a fast food joint for subsistence)
Its like a whole new apartment!
The kitchen, sparkling! (that big ol’ mechanized thing in the background is drying our carpet from the leak they fixed)
We have a coffee maker!?!?
Lovely, I want to brush my teeth in here!
And there you have it! Despite our achey joints and overall tiredness we tackled the growing problem and blasted it to smithereens! There’s still work to be done as far as laundry and organizing the bedroom, but its not nearly as bad as the rest of the place was just a few hours ago. Nothing like having a leak in a place you don’t own to give you incentive to spiff it up so it can actually be fixed! Now to keep it up and make sure it never gets that bad ever again.
