Today’s Weight: 381.8 lbs
Yesterday’s Water: 172 oz
Yesterday’s Accomplishments: 2 Items Completed plus substantial progress on two other items. I managed to do an analysis on Alice’s pattern sales since she put her first patterns online for sale in April 2015. Shows lifetime sales by pattern, etc. We’re going to use it to plan forward movement, pattern revisions, and making a pattern updates website available for her existing customers. I also was able to organize Alice’s side of the closet, wipe down the walls and ceilings of the closet, and clean out the rest of the contents. I still need to vacuum the carpet in the closet (before I can cross off the room as clean), but other than that, it’s clean, organized, and usable again. We can even put our hamper back in there again! But it won’t be crossed off until tomorrow’s report when I will have vacuumed it (for the first time in probably a year).
Whenever I clean the house, I have a tendency to start at either end of the house – generally I clean the bedroom, closet, and 1/2 bathroom first. In theory, I’m spending 1/3 of my day there (although lately with children’s sleep disturbances that hasn’t actually been true lately. But the bedroom isn’t exactly large, and we’ve got enough furniture in there that it’s pretty full. So ideally, there’s absolutely NOTHING on the floor – that’s the only way navigation in that room is very workable. So it becomes problematic when there’s even a small mess in there. Right now, the mess is a big mess.
The real reason I pick that end of the house is that it’s got a room that has a door that closes, it has three spaces (more on that in a second) and it is usually not as bad as the rest of the house. I have a somewhat unconventional method of cleaning – I know for a fact that it drives Alice up the wall, but it’s just how I clean. I have never been able to “spend 20 minutes cleaning throughout the house”. When I’m done, even if I’ve made things look generally better throughout the house, I don’t really see it – what I see is all the mess that remains. So, like I said, I’m a more unconventional cleaner. I pick a room, tidy, put everything away, throw away trash, empty trash cans, wash windows, clean surfaces, vacuum, etc. When I’m done, the room is essentially spotless – nothing’s sitting out, surfaces are empty, and so on. Now I mark that room off as done. The problem with cleaning is that it’s a never-ending task. So I get a room done, and the next time I go to clean, I go (this is the part that especially drives Alice crazy) back to the rooms that are already marked off as done and refresh them – generally I’m not going to redo most of the deep cleaning – I try to do windows every few weeks, and dust approximately the same frequency, so I usually get back into cleaning again before that much time has elapsed – but I do prefer to vacuum twice a week. And of course I put things back away and tidy and organize, etc. A process that Alice has previously called moving everything a quarter inch to the right.
But yeah, I pick that end of the house because I can close the door to the bedroom, lay down in bed, and see three spaces that are clean and nothing that isn’t. In my head, the house is subdivided into spaces, each of which is on my cleaning list. Some people would treat the bedroom and closet as one space – I choose to treat it as two, and the half bath as a separate space as well because it breaks it down into smaller chunks. I may not be able to clean all three spaces in one attempt, but (when things are maintained better than they are now) I can usually get at least one of them done. So here’s how I’ve broken up the house:
- Master Bedroom
- Master Bedroom Closet
- Half Bathroom
- Office
- Office Closet
- Nursery
- Nursery Closet
- Linen/Hall Closet
- Full Bathroom
- Hallway
- Dining Room (Front Room)
- Furnace Room
- Coat Closet
- Kitchen
- Living Room
- Entertainment Closet
- Sewing Room
So that’s 17 spaces. Ever since I moved into this house (11 years ago), that’s how the house has been split up in my head and cleaning process – the names and usages of the rooms of the house have changed over the years, along with the other occupants. Weirdly, it occurs to me now that eight people have lived in this house with me – the current three included. I’ve also always been the most neat-freak of all the people who have lived here so I’ve always done the majority of the cleaning so that it was done to my specifications. So naturally, usage of the rooms has changed over time. The sewing room (thankfully) is not my problem – so I’ve got 16 spaces to deal with.
The other advantage to doing things the way that I do is that I can usually draw a line through the house to indicate where the clean parts and the not clean parts are – there’s two built in really convenient thresholds for this – the first one is the transition between the hallway and dining room. It’s a small hallway opening, and drawing a line there cuts the house approximately in half – all the bedrooms and bathrooms are on one side, and the daytime living part of the house on the other side. The other obvious transition is between the kitchen and the dining room.
Cleaning pretty much entirely stopped around the time the kids were born. The kitchen and bathrooms are the only rooms that have gotten attention in the interim. There’s only so many hours in the day, and with my job and then taking care of twins in the evening, I don’t have much energy for else. The problem is having a messy house saps most of my energy for other things as well. So I’m back at it again. It’s not my only major project right now – it’s one of several. But I’m putting in a sustained effort to put in at least 30 minutes a night towards cleaning the house – and part of that is identifying baby stuff we don’t need anymore and getting rid of it. We’ve known we were going to have any more kids pretty much since they were born, and so all that stuff that the kids have outgrown can be purged.
You might notice, I’ve got a lot of my plate right now. This could be frustrating, but I’m trying not to let it get to me. I’ve got my schedule and tasks organized – not everything is going to happen in as fast a timeframe as I’d like, but everything will be done eventually. I’m trying to monitor what I eat and drink, lose weight, clean house, parent two toddlers in the terrible twos, help Alice with her business, work on a software development project for my business, keep performing at my day job, etc. etc. etc.
The funny thing is that my current workload is a bit stressful, but I’m actually happier right now than I’ve been in a long time. The reality is, three months and (almost) 20 pounds ago, I was not happy – didn’t like the direction my life was going, wasn’t having a lot of fun, and was having trouble motivating myself to do anything aside from get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep. I was doing the minimums to get by. I still have my frustrations and irritations, but in generally I’m much happier than I’ve been in a long time.
So what’s next for this blog? I’ve been tracking my weight, my water, and I’ve started tracking my to do list. Doing a bit more physically to improve my physical condition is the next thing – I’m not talking about any serious program of exercise/running/weight lifting or anything like that at this point. My hope is that while cleaning I can find my FitBit and get back to wearing it everyday and counting steps. That at least gives me some motivation to walk more. My new desk already has me walking farther several times a day, but I could build on that, and hope to. As soon as I find my FitBit, you’ll start seeing a step count added to the stats on these posts.