I am not a naturally organized or neat person. Like, really not. I have friends who are inherently tidy. I have family that border on compulsive about it. For me, though, it is a constant uphill battle. I am great at the planning stage of cleaning and organizing. I excel at the prioritizing, the list making and the diagram drawing. It is the doing and follow through that always get me. In one of my previous attempts at not being a slob, I purchased some books on organizing. I came across one of them recently and of course I figured that reading about how to organize counts towards my effort to becoming organized.
As suggested in the book, I wrote down what I wanted to accomplish and why. I then made a list, in priority order, of the areas in my home that needed work.
My Master List:
1. Kitchen-it is the major center of activity in my house, and being able to cook meals quickly and easily is the key to our debt reduction plan. It is easier and more appealing to cook in a clean well organized kitchen.
2. Mail Center-a major source of clutter, and relatively quick to fix.
3. Master Bedroom-currently doubles as our office, so it is full of piles of paper and other clutter. Not exactly conducive to restful sleep.
4. Garage-not only contains storage, but is also our laundry room and will hopefully have a craft/sewing area for me and a place to set up our underused treadmill. Having this area organized will aid us in keeping the rest of the house neat.
5. The Kids’ Rooms-All three are a mess. They have inadequate storage for toys, leading to lost and broken parts.
6. Front Room-this room is low priority because it currently doesn’t have much in it and sorting out the rest of the house will get the bulk of this room sorted as well.
7. Patio-We hope to eventually create a welcoming outdoor seating area in which to enjoy barbecues and summer evenings.
Now that I have my first target, I need to figure out what I want to do in there. I tried to break my kitchen issues down into the logical areas that needed work, and again listed them in priority order. Under each area I also wrote down the key elements I wanted to fix or centers I wanted to create as well.
My Abbreviated Kitchen List:
1. Counter tops
2. Cabinets
3. Pantry
4. Fridge
5. Freezer
6. Big Freezer (in the garage, but included here because it is essentially and extension of the kitchen)
Starting with the counter tops because it is the main work area, and has the biggest visual impact in the kitchen, I thought about what things actually justified taking up valuable counter real estate, things that get used almost daily. These are the things I came up with.
1. Coffee Center-coffee pot, coffee canister, filters, sweetener, etc.
2. Canisters-flour, sugar, etc.
3. Spices- I have a turntable with the most frequently used ones next to the stove.
4. Small Appliances- toaster oven, can opener
5. Homework Center-I made an area for all of the supplies the kids need to do their homework. Each child has a box with pencils, crayons, scissors, glue stick etc. And I also set up an area for paper and extra supplies, and a place for all of the papers and forms they bring home from school.
The reading of the organizing book and coming up with the plan above took a day. I don’t mean that it took a whole day to accomplish it, but that that was what I accomplished that day. The next day I decided to get started on the actual work part. I looked at how I needed to accomplish the Counter Top step.
1. Wash and put away dishes.
2. Do DDD. Armed with 3 containers, Dispose, Donate, and Distribute to other areas of the house, clear off the counter surfaces. This saves time by not walking down the hall every time I find an item that belongs in another room. For the kitchen, the donate bin actually held recyclables.
3. Wipe down all surfaces.
4. Set up my centers from above list.
And that’s as far as I got. I spent the remainder of the day trying to keep my youngest daughter from removing all of her clothes, (diaper included) every 10 minutes.
Each new day is a new opportunity to do better (barf) so I set to work. Fortunately, it was warm enough out that I didn’t need to concern myself too much with Olivia’s state of dress. I figured it would take between 2 and 21/2 hours to do what I wanted with the counter tops.
As I worked I jotted down things I had overlooked in my planning. Things like the need for a Phone Center. Basically, just a notepad and pen holder placed near the phone, a simple, but necessary thing. Cleaning the stove top took much longer than I had intended, and to be honest, it still isn’t as clean as I would like. There is a lot of really baked on crud around the burners that I haven’t figured out how to remove. After an hour of soaking and scrubbing and soaking again, I had to move on. When I got to the Spices, I decided that I actually wanted them in the cupboard instead of on the counter top. I gave the turntable a wipe down and noted the change on my list. In the end, it took me 4 hours to do the job. Actually, it took me 4 hours until I was too pooped to do any more. The job itself was almost finished. Once I sat down, I wrote a new list. This one was of all the things I still needed to do before this job was truly finished.
1. Homework Center-Find a storage solution for the forms and flyers that need to be kept temporarily. (Magnetic file pocket on the side of the fridge?)
2. Phone Center-add a note pad
3. Distribute Bin- finish emptying it.
My feet hurt.
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