Drawers, and Shelves, and Furniture, oh my!

As I had suspected, getting the big stuff done in Fletch's room wasn't too tricky. I got the drawers of clothes and shelves of books sorted in no time. But, as I started to try to clean up the other massive amounts of little things: legos, craft projects, comic books, I realized that it wasn't the little things that made Fletch's room so cluttered. It was the furniture. There was a chair from when he turned 2, and a giant toy table from when he was 3 still in there. Clearly, these weren't the right size for our big boy. Out they went - and already, the room looked a lot better.

The toy area before and after:

The hardest part of this room was that the kids were home and wanted to "help" the whole time. So, I put them to work: taking old sporting equipment out to the garage, sorting the endless piles of legos into useable pieces, figure out what the remote control we found actually controlled. Eventually, they got bored, and I got to finish up by myself. But not before we had a good dance around the room to some Buddy Holly covers I was listening to while we worked.

Let me go back to the Lego sorting for a moment. With the big toy table gone, I decided to reinvent the toy storage/shelf thing into a Lego workbench. That meant getting rid of all the junky plastic random toys that were in there, and putting the tubs to use to hold all the legos. It took about 3 hours, but in the end there was a tub for each of the following: Mini figures, mini figure accessories, generic bricks, big specialty parts, small specialty parts, vehicle parts, and mostly completed pieces. Now, if anyone wanted to actually rebuild the ti-fighter or power miners vehicle, they could find the pieces, and the guys to go with them. (I also have these Toy-Story like visions where all the mini-figures are glad to be in the same tub so they can hang out and chit chat when no one is around: "Hey Darth, How ya doin'?" or "Hey Batman" says pizza delivery guy, "Wanna arm wrestle?"

I also did a massive round of dusting. Lamps, vents, base boards, blinds. And, I cleaned the windows and sills inside and out. I even woke up a VERY BIG spider. It was actually funny, as usually there are lots of things around to grab and smush a bug with, but everything thing was put away, so I just stood screaming at it for a second before running to the closet to grab a shoe. If there was even an argument to leave a pair of shoes out; being at-the-ready for spider killing seems like a good one.

In the end, there were 2 donation bags, 2 garage sale bags, 2 trash bags, 2 pieces of furniture and a full vacuum cylinder of dirt taken out of Fletcher's room. It kinda blows my mind that all of that was jammed in there. Now, he can actually find his school uniforms, put his shoes in the closet, and play with his toys. Mission accomplished.

The Closet before and after:

The dresser before and after:

Week 8: Fletcher's Room

Because week 8 of my mission was the final week of summer, I was feeling a little bummed. I should have been done by now. Not to say that the house isn't tremendously better than the day back in June when I hung up the back packs and busted out the swim bag. But, still. It would have been nice to kick back in a clean house as soon as the kids headed off for school on day 1.

So, for the final week of summer, I thought I would tackle Fletcher's room. That way, at least he would get to start the school year off with a clean room. And, Vi's room was still in pretty good shape from back in June, so it made me feel like they'd both be in a good spot.

Fletcher's room was not going to be too tough - no icky mold or really old stuff to sort through. But, he does have one unique cleaning obstacle that no other part of the room suffers from. It's Lego-dustitis. See, the legos have the ability to leap off the table where they are supposed to be played with and spread themselves evenly about the carpet. This is probably because the table was really designed for someone half Fletcher's age, and so it's too small to actually play at. The problem then, isn't just the legos-layer that covers the room. It's that it is too hard to get to the ones at the far side of the table to play with, so they just get dusty. And, it's too scary to think I might vacuum up a lego Darth Vadar light saber (or my favorite - the mini figure maracas), so the carpet gets really dusty too. My nose scrunches up in a sneeze just thinking about it.

On top of the legos, Fletch doesn't like to part with things, so there is a lot of clutter. Old "plans" for Club Penguin igloos, puppets made with popsicle sticks, things that have beads and glue and feathers and that kind of stuff. It will be tough to figure out what to keep and what to toss. And, finally, Fletch's closet needs some work. This was the guest room before we had a second kid, so we used the closet to store things that we worth keeping, but kept out of the way, like sleeping bags and my wedding dress. Now that he actually has clothes and toys of his own, that stuff will definitely have to be pared back. (goodbye old ugly coat dress?)

Still Clean After 3 Weeks

How has it been 3 weeks since I last posted? The good news is that work continued a bit, even if the writing hasn't kept up. The bad news: summer ended and the job isn't done. Well, I'm not gonna worry about that, I'm gonna stick to the good news part.

So, in the 3 weeks since I actually cleaned my bathroom, it has managed to stay that way. No spiderwebs, or mold on the ceiling, or gunk in the corners. Still bright and shiny! I even took the kids away for a week in early August, and when I came home and went to put my toiletries away I was a bit surprised to see my clean bathroom - I had forgotten how nice it looked.

However, it was no small feat in getting it there. After the day and a half of de-cluttering, I got out the chemicals, cranked up the fan, opened the window and got to the dirty work. There was lots of spraying and scrubbing and rinsing and then repeating it all over again. About 4 hours worth. By the end, my arms were SORE!!! Like, not being able to lift them over my head kind of sore. Still, after it was all said and done, taking shower in the super-clean bathroom felt great. Still does, every day.

Here is my clean sink.....

Here are the cabinets before and after...

The rest looks pretty great too, but you'll just have to take my word for it, 'cause I feel funny putting pictures of my bathroom up on the web. Somehow, talking about my daughter's underwear collection is ok, but showing the world my face soap seems a little too private. Whatever. At least it's clean.

Say Cheese!

I am working my way through the bathroom. The first step was to get rid of all the clutter. The massive cleaning will come after. For such a small bathroom, there is quite a lot of storage. Inside the linen closet are 5 shelves that go about 30 inches deep. There is also the medicine chest, and the cabinets under the sink.

But, even having all these places to put things is no reason to have the odd collection of things that I found there. I threw away 3 bags of trash. Yes - three - full whole bags. Everything from 5 year old pregnancy tests to a large bag of TWA travel soaps. First off, TWA hasn't been around for over a decade. When questioned, Kevin confessed that as a young professional back in the early 90s, TWA had screwed him once, and the only way he could think to get back was to steal all the lavatory soaps every chance he got. While clearly this scheme worked - after all they DID go under - I'm still not sure why he had to SAVE all the soaps.

Of course there were the obligatory expired medicines - I think the prize winner was from 1996. And, lots of hotel bottles of shampoos, lotions, old hair styling products (did I ever use stiff hold gel?). But the thing I found the most of was dental products. Some of it is attributed to the fact that we each get a goodie bag at our bi-annual dental visits, but it went beyond that. 24 sample tubes of tooth paste, more then 3 dozen mini packs of floss, 3 packages of flosser replacement heads, 3 different electric toothbrushes, and about 15 unopened toothbrushes. Aside from the used electric ones, I may hand out these products at Halloween and keep the flavored Tootsie Rolls for myself.

In addition to being overly stocked in the dental hygiene department, we had lots of overlap in the face department too. In the course of cleaning this and the other bathrooms in the house, I have found no fewer than 4 Norelco razors. Just how many chins does one guy have? But, before I dared to complain, I also found about 8 different bottles of moisturizer for my face. Some quite expensive. And, do I ever use any of them? Nope. Well, almost nope. Sometimes for a few weeks in the winter when my skin dries out. But certainly not enough to warrant 2 different types much less 8.

All of these discoveries made me wonder what exactly we think of our own faces. Why do we save all this stuff and never use it? Or, if we don't use it, why do we keep buying it? I don't know if I'll ever figure out the answers to the questions of our vanity. But, I do know that now there are far fewer things in the closet, so I may actually be able to find what I need. I also can put my toiletries IN the medicine cabinet rather than having to perch them all on the counter.

Week 7 - Tiny But Mighty

Knowing I had a short week (we didn't get back from vacation until Monday night), I picked the tiniest room left - the master bathroom - to tackle in week 7. It is an oddity of this house, that the master bathroom is so tiny, just the width of the tub, and not even an electrical socket at the sink (for scale, I think 2 of this room could fit into the toy closet). It also has a pocket door that doesn't lock - so much for privacy! But I digress.

Anyway, when I started the summer, I had big plans for the week with my bathroom. I was gonna clean it up lickety-split and then I could...bang! Paint it a new color. It's so small, I really thought it was possible.

But, when I opened the cabinet of shelves full of 8 years worth of sample size shampoo bottles and expired medicines, the dreams of a newly painted bathroom evaporated. Just put that into the "to-do" pile of improvement projects once the house is clean. (Maybe I should actually write that list down).

Aside from just being dusty and a bit gross, there are other big challenges in this tiny bathroom. One is the mold. I promised that I wouldn't embarrass my better half by publishing the mold photos. But let's just say the fan broke for awhile, and as a result, some of the wall condensation from our poorly vented showers turned to mold. Major yuck. The good news is, the fan is operational again - and once it is clean it should stay that way.

The second challenge will be the tub. It has this weird texture that clings to that soap/dirt build up like I have never seen anywhere else. I wash it down regularly, but in all the little crevices have gotten really bad. I am envisioning myself gasping in the fumes on my hands and knees to get this fixed. Probably why I have never tackled it up to this point.

Anyway, wish me luck. I am trying to envision a clean and happy place as I work. I'm not sure that's gonna be enough.

Another Week Off

Last week was the second of three vacations scheduled that were going to interrupt my summer cleaning lunacy. At least this time, I had the sense to realize I wasn't gonna make it and just happily took the week off from cleaning as well as work and other stuff.

And, I am gonna cut myself another break. We are leaving next week to go visit the Holts - yay!, and Fletch's birthday falls in between, so I am not even going to try to double up this week and get an extra one done. The stuff that is left is far too hard, and I just have too much other stuff to do. But, I am gonna tackle a bathroom. That's gotta count for something.

In the meantime, we had a great time in Taos. The kids were awesome in the car, and it was a great time: hiking, eating, teaching the kids dominoes and card games, and just getting out of this doggone heat! The high temperatures there are the lows in Dallas. I honestly don't know how much longer I can take it. Anyway, here are a few highlights of our trip.

Week 6: The Family Room (of Doom!)

So I'm about half way in, and after cleaning out the toy room, I was hoping to make the next week an "easy" room. But, a couple things have happened. First off, there are no easy rooms left. The small rooms are full of stuff (like the laundry room), and the big rooms, even if they aren't too cluttered, just take a lot of time to cover all the corners.

But, I knew that next week we'd be heading out of town, and it might be nice to open the door and come into a family room that wasn't a giant clutter-bomb. And really, I think the biggest challenge in this room was going to be the dust. Up-high shelves, recessed lighting, a ceiling fan, and a never used fireplace were great places for dust to settle that wouldn't get cleaned up in the regular tidy up sessions that happen every once in a blue moon.

Using gravity to my advantage I started high and worked my way down. Removing and dusting everything from (and including) the top shelves of the display area and sneezed my way down through these shelves. I also sorted the pictures and knick knacks to try to give things amore cohesive look. And, I removed a few of the bigger photos - I am thinking there might be a wall that could use them.

Here's the shelves before and after:

After that, I tackled the recessed lighting, vents, ceiling fan, and fireplace screen. Crazy amounts of dust. Dust elephants were marching through the air on their way to the carpet.

Putting away the things on the tables, and Violet's toy kitchen wasn't too tricky, and that made things look considerably neater. The cabinet on one side of the display area was easy too - as I could move all the games into the newly cleaned toy closet from last week.

The cabinet before and after:

But, then there was the yarn closet. I have a lot of yarn. Compared to some ladies I met while working at the Shabby Sheep for 5 years, maybe not so much. But, I try not to buy things I am not going to use right away, so the fact that there was a cabinet full, plus books, 3 kits of needles and a smattering of knitting bags and gadgets was a little disheartening. I got to it though - sorting things into "special" and "left overs" and moved the books to the craft section of the toy closet. Still, there was a lot in there. Maybe when I am done cleaning, I can spend a year knitting on projects from the yarn I already have - maybe 2 years? I feel guilty to think about it. Maybe the next time I am tempted to buy yarn, I will try to remember what is down there and spend the money on shoes instead.

Since none of those things were really that bad I decided I would take a little time and clean the couches. Our distressed leather couches are older than our marriage. Kevin got them back when we were dating, and they are still some of the best pieces of furniture in the house. They just get a little grimy from time to time. So, I put together my soap solution, and then wiped down each cushion. From there, I unzipped and unhooked all the cushions so that I could get up the dust that was under them.

Imagine my shock - SHOCK! - when it wasn't just an odd cheerio or sock in there, but piles of dirt. Real dirt! Full of dog hair and rocks(?) and clumps of the dirt similar to what you would find in our yard. Not to mention Han Solo's blaster, a wooden snake toy, countless hair bands, almost a dollar in change, and the plastic flag from some toy (although none of us could say which toy for sure). I am truly mortified that Fletch's teacher sat on that couch during a visit not too long ago.

Still, after all that cleaning and dusting, and a fair share of vacuuming the family room is now pretty darn great. I have also noted that someone could come in my front door, and walk through my house to the back door and only be in rooms that are neat and tidy. This must be how normal people live. I am looking forward to it myself.

I am starting to feel a bit like "Extreme Dirt Makeover" but here are the rest of the before and after shots from the family room...