A Better Life
I have been blessed to work at home or work part-time most of my adult life. There were times that I worked full-time but it was usually just for a short period of time or was very flexible hours. The last year and half was not like that. I worked 40 hours a week outside of my house plus up to an hour of commute time each way. I also have 2 kids at home that are very involved in school and church activities, my oldest is an adult that lives on his own. My husband has somewhat set hours but is required to work overtime sometimes. He has to be at work at 6:30 am right now, it used to be 7:00, but either way he leaves before my daughter even gets up, so mornings are on me. My son drives to school and my daughter rides the bus, they both leave the house around 7:00 am. This means the earliest I could leave the house was around 7, and if I worked 8 hours and took the lunch time we were required to take, the earliest I could get home was 5:30 pm unless I worked locally. Many of my stores were 1 1/2 hours – 3 hours from my house, so many days, I worked 10-12 hours each day when you add in the drive time. I tried to schedule any shorter days when we had church, games, or other night time activities. Put all this together and you get the idea that I wasn’t home much and when I was home, I had to cook, wash clothes, pay the bills, and all the other household chores that had to be done just to survive. Then there was helping with homework, or helping to study for a test, not to mention all the forms to fill out, fundraisers to keep up with, etc…
We survived, but the house just got worse and worse. I just didn’t have time to clean and declutter the house like I should have. The kids each have their chores that they do to help keep the house running, but they don’t do any decluttering or extra chores without my direct supervision usually. We would spend a Saturday occasionally going through their closets to remove outgrown clothes and see what needed to be replaced. After a year of this, my house was just piles of stuff with more piles on top of them. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was listening to a podcast called Organize 365 by Lisa Woodruff. If I like a podcast, I always go to the beginning and listen to it from the beginning. She gave lots of little suggestions, one of the best was to start a Sunday Basket, which I started. This allowed me to get my paper better organized. I liked it so well, I became a Certified Sunday Basket Workshop Organizer. Then I started doing a little here and there when I had a few minutes or a day, I packed up several boxes of clothes and household goods that we didn’t need. What I actually mean is I filled up the back of my van on 4 different occasions. I took some to a consignment store, sent some home with my son, others I donated. The main thing was, they were out of my house.
I have gradually took back one area at a time. Little by little, I will get the house decluttered and organized the way I want it. When the boys were young, we had made the decision to eat at the table for our meals, so the table usually stays usable, but the back side is not used unless our oldest or another visitor is present. This means that stuff that was put on the table, just got pushed to the back or set in the unused seats, so that is the first area I wanted cleaned off. My daughter and I cleaned the dining room from top to bottom one Saturday, some stuff went away, some got put away and the rest just moved out to deal with later, but the dining room was clean. We have kept the table basically cleaned off for about 3 months now. It may get piled up during the day since it is where everything happens, homework, present wrapping, candy making, etc…, but we make a point to clean it off completely every night before we sit down to eat supper. The next area I tackled is the kitchen counter. We have a small kitchen that is not laid out very well, the kitchen/dining area has 3 doorways and is the center of the house so everything gets dropped on the end of the kitchen counter as people pass though. I haven’t been able to keep it clean, but I have made a big difference by just putting things where they belong or asking the kids to put their stuff up. It was cleaned off over the weekend and I took the picture below today. It is an ongoing process, but it is much better.
That is kind of the point, decluttering and cleaning is an ongoing job that is never going to go away. Organizing is great, making a place for everything in your house is great, but none of it matters if you don’t put things back where they go when you are done with them. I am super organized in some areas and just a complete mess in others. It is getting better and one thing I learned a long time ago, anything that I do in the house makes it better. Sometimes it is putting away the clean dishes or cleaning the microwave, other times it is as simple as picking up a twisty tie and putting it in the drawer. It doesn’t matter how big or little the action is, it makes it better. I might spend all day decluttering and organizing a closet or I might spend 5 minutes walking through the house picking up the trash and throwing it away, both make my house better. They make my house look better, feel better, work better. I can’t wait for my family to decide to do these things by themselves, because they won’t. I can remind them, but the most important thing I can do is to model it. If they see me making a point to put things away where they belong, decluttering, or throwing away trash, then when I remind them it will make a bigger impact. I hope over time it will become a habit for them which will not only help our house to be better, but I hope it will help them when they have their own dorms, apartments and houses to avoid some of the problems that my husband and I have had to learn to overcome. After all, isn’t that what we all want, a better life for our kids, both now and later.
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