OK. I admit it. I am a slob, and very poor house keeper. To put it bluntly, I suck.
After someone very dear to me told me my house was "pretty bad" after visiting (and me having a panic attack for the last 6 weeks over it), my new resolution is to become a Domestic Goddess.
Then I thought, well, maybe there are others out there just like me. Or some who have reached that Goddess Status and could impart wisdom to those like me who are on the road to discovery.
So I have a plan. I am inviting others to jump on the Band Wagon and either do a Domestic Goddess post about something you have done, how you did it, favourite tips, skills one needs - and leave a comment with the link so I can write about it in the next post. I'll do awards at the end of the month for my favourite tips! Complete with banner to add to your blog!
I want to learn the Art of how to get my house (and life) in order. I have started by scrubbing out the fridge and tossing anything that is remotely out of date. I am following a mum tip, and putting a bowl of Bicarb in the door to help ward off smells.
I have scrubbed the food cupboard, and restacked the food. I need to learn to buy wisely. And buy more fresh.
The cutlery draw has been washed and scrubbed. Everything in it (we someone was smart enough to put some wet stuff in the draw before we went away and it was mouldy when we came back!). HOwever, I was just reminded we got two cuttlery sets for the wedding, so one is going into the draw. I will toss the rest, and only keep the teaspoons. We always need more teaspoons.
I am going to toss out anything in the utility draw that I have not used in the last 3 months. I will buy a new set of cooking utensils.
Declutter the things I have in the kitchen. Organise the cupboards.
So. Here is the start of the journey. I am going to do this. I want others to join and help me on the way!
Come on, and link some posts! (I'll be waiting eagerly!)
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Domestic Goddess Challenge #1
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5 comments:
I'm by no means a domestic goddess... the little boy and the bigger boy see to that... but I am heaps neater than I used to be. Flylady was the thingie I used for awhile. Some of it is really corny, gimmicky stuff but some of it is useful... I just took what helped me and chucked the rest. If the e-mails are too full on, maybe go for the books?
I will certainly hop on the bandwagon with you! :D
Hmmm, I was oging to suggest flylady as well - not that I have ever been to the website or done any of it myself or anything. ;o) In fact I am renowned for not doing anything domestic-y and quite frankly the best thing about getting a dishwasher was just that it stacked the dirty dishes away from public view.
What's my tip? Uhhmmm....Well one thing I've done is work into the nightly routine now that when Jimbo puts Harry down, I tidy up all the back area because I don't have interruptions. So having something that you have as your own routine when you already have one for your child can be handy.
Buy Tara a little broom/cloth and get her to help you as you go. Harry is actually really helpful and will scurb down something with a hell of a lot mroe vigour than I ever would!
Write down your dinners for the week, their ingredients and make sure you therefore have all the stuff in the house to prevent expensive take-away. When you go shopping always buy another toothpaste/toilet paper/soap, whatever that you always run out of so you always have one in the house no matter whether it's due to be bought or not. If I am picking something up from the floor I do an arm's length 'sweep' and pick up lots of other stuff at the same time and as I walk back to drop the first thing off I put away the other stuff as well.
OK I can't think of much because as I said, definitel NOT a domstic goddess here. Lawd, cleaning out the cutlery tray is something we only do when we move!
Cheers, Cass
I hear you sister!
i'm not a clean goddess. But this year i have decided this is the year to do something about my life & about our house.
We have so much stuff (from years of collecting - mainly my hubby)
We have done a tip run today, we are cleaning the carpets today, getting everything we don't need in the house out into the garage theh next weekend we will get everything out of the garage onto our back lawn & then sort it out, not everything will be going back in there, the rest will go to the tip.
We are putting a few things on Ebay.
If i had my i would hire a dumpster & chuck everything except what we need. But hubby isn't like me & i've got to try & Get him to throw things out next week so that's a challenge in it's self.
MEL'S HINT: Declutter 1 room at a time.
tomorrow hubby is painting a few rooms then it will declutter the kitchen & clean all cupboards.
So i am getting there.
I wish i had a cleaning godmother that would just magically get rid of everything!
Well i'm off to do some more cleaning !
A late hint, but it should help.
If you have trouble with throwing things out, especially if you think that you might need it in the future... stick it in a box and put it in the closet. Choose an arbitrary amount of time (back when I first heard it it was 1 year, but you can do shorter if you like). If you haven't needed it in that space of time, haven't missed it or really thought about it, then the odds are that you can do without it and can get rid of the item.
PreZ is a pretty big hoarder, specifically of computer stuff and scavenged parts and things (Ally might be similar, it seems to be a geek thing). In some cases I've just had to put my foot down about things being thrown out. We had 2 really old printers (dot matrix...), PreZ was always going on about how it was going to one day be used in some system to log activity on his machines, and I refused based on the noise thing (I am not going to sit in a computer room with a dot matrix rattling on and off all day). He never got around to setting it up... the printers had been sitting in the bottom of a closet at his mother's house in AU, then moved with us here to the US. When we moved last year, they had never been out of the moving boxes, and I insisted they not move to this house, being that they'd been in those boxes since our international move some 6(!) years prior.
In other instances I've done similar things. When he's expressed a desire to keep something I've pointed out that it's been around for ages, hasn't been looked at in that time and obviously hasn't been missed, and that the odds of us actually using it are virtually nil.
Most of those shows on TV where people's houses look like a tip, it boils down to a similar thing... the stuff has started to take over. And so I try very hard to stop the stuff becoming too much. When there's too much stuff, you run out of space, and then cleaning around the clutter becomes very hard.
Things that are broken need to be binned, things that have life left can be donated or sold, depending on their condition. And yeah, it's hard trying to keep more stuff from coming in than going out.
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