First a followup - I now have the ornaments off the main Christmas tree, the studio tree, and the tree in the dining room which had all ornaments from Colonial Williamsburg. (We have been members for a couple of decades and get one each year.) The ornaments are boxed and ready for storage. The trees are taken apart (artificial trees), boxed and stored in the basement. I also stored the decorations from the kitchen, dining room and our entry hall (one box total) in their box. Living room is next.
I started thinking about how much more cleaning, organizing and cleaning up I used to get done and tried to figure out why I don’t get more done now. Now I realize what I used to do would be much too little for many people, but it kept our house clean. Lately I only get the basics laundry, and changing bedding and towels, done.
When we were first married, husband would come home on Friday afternoon exhausted and go to bed early and I would clean our tiny apartment while he slept. Not too many rooms to clean and a time to do so.
After we moved to our house I did not do a good job of cleaning - big house, my work load increased - then I started reading books about organizing. We go to Barnes and Nobles weekly and I was bored and found out that there were books about organizing. At about the same time we were on the board of a crafts organization which rotated the board meetings to different board members houses - I really needed to get the house in some semblance of order. Then again we had saying in the group of kindred spirits - “Have the board meeting at your house, better you should clean then me.” I started reading the books while we are at the bookstore - I read fairly quickly and would finish about a book a month. While much of what was in the in the books did not apply to me, they did give me impetus to work at organizing and cleaning the house.
The schedule I came up with was that I used to clean the floors and dust the upstairs the first Wednesday of the month. On the second Wednesday of the month I would do the same downstairs and clean the bathroom downstairs. On the third Wednesday I would again do the upstairs and clean the bathroom upstairs. On the fourth I would again do the downstairs floors and dusting and clean the kitchen. I did this for over a decade. Now, I don’t get to anything that it is not urgent - WHY?
Again there was a change in my life. My husband is home all the time now! When he went to work I would clean upstairs in the morning on the weeks I did same and the downstairs in the evening while he was upstairs. Now he is with me all the time and I have no more mornings as we get up late (and go to bed late) and he is around most of the evening..
Also we have the RV stuff in the dining room half the year - next to impossible to clean a floor covered with boxes. Now we have the loom and it’s stuff in the living room - yes, it is now back and set up since the Christmas tree came down last week - again hard to clean around it.
I used to food shop on Mondays and do a fill in on Fridays for the weekend if needed. Husband hated food shopping so I did not want to need anything on the weekend when he would be home. I also would make sure that I would not need to food shop while he was on vacation from work (his place was on a modified school year, several one week vacations). Now we shop willy nilly - barely a list in my cell phone, no set day and we can end up food shopping 3 -5 days a week. Last week we had a day when we spent an hour and half in 2 supermarkets - and bought maybe 6 items - he likes to go up and down aisles and see what there is - looking for the magic healthy, tasty, low in carbs meal he will love, which is he is sure exists somewhere. I used to go out on Tuesdays - Thursdays for a 15 minute trip to and from the post office (check our box and mail anything to go out) - now we go out for at least an hour a day - wandering in one or the other of 3 stores. All that time which could be used at home to get things done - gone.
So, life changed again. So I have to come up with new plans for cleaning the house - because it needs to be done more often. I am thinking of trying Tuesday nights instead of Wednesday days.
Of course there still exists the problem of trying to clean while husband is home - clean a bathroom and he will need it and just try to dust his computers and desk while he is working at them.
I need to get the food shopping back on a schedule also. We have had a shake up here in supermarkets which has made food shopping even more confusing. The store I shopped at since we were married as my main store, was taken over around when he quit his job. (Understand this was a mutual decision based on his being horribly burned out at the job and he works from home now.) He was just starting coming food shopping with me then and he pointed out that we went to the market I had been going to and then to one from another chain as “mine” never had what I wanted any more. So we started just going to the “other” market. Since then the food markets here have changed. The chain I used to go to and another chain owned by the same company are gone in bankruptcy. In their old locations new markets are opening - several are upscale ones with food bars - too expensive unless there is a sale to buy food there and the food bars never look properly tended - another one of these (which will be the third chain like this around our area) will be opening in the fall. The chain that was my alternate has opened a second store a little further away from us - in a better area with better parking so he is not as upset about going there as before. And Walmart opened a “Neighborhood Market” here. Our Walmart stores have small food sections. They are not the huge food markets or stores that they are elsewhere (and are not open 24 hours). This store is food and what one would normally find in a supermarket, but still not the size of the food departments in Walmarts in other areas nor do they carry everything the other Walmarts (or other supermarkets) carry. To give you an idea - this store does not have a bakery - just items baked elsewhere and brought in; the deli counter never seems to be open - we wonder if we have to ask to have it opened.
I need to start looking at the circulars and matching items to my list again. I used to have a list on the fridge - who ever took the “item” which brought quantity left to the point where we needed to start looking to buy it, would the add the item to the list on the fridge. Now I put it in a “BUY list” memo in my cell phone. We always seem to be in a rush, so I buy what we need NOW and wait for the rest. I do try keep up my coupons - but our diets and lives are such that, combined with less coupons being delivered, and the fact that we buy some stuff at Costco which does not accept coupons, and that we buy a lot of store brand items, we use a lot less supermarket coupons than before. (Though, last week the supermarket had brand name chicken soup - you know the brand - on sale for 49 cents with their store card and I had a coupon for $1.50 off - that was a good deal!) I keep my coupons and store cards in the car so if I need something - it is just outside the store in the parking lot. (I keep store cards we might use when traveling in the RV and some of them also in the car, and I keep store cards that are only local also in our van - just in case). The coupon holders come with us on trips. I have one holder for regular and store coupons and another just for a large hardware chain which puts out constant coupons (I am guessing you know which one I mean). I bring them into the house once a week (okay, I mean to bring them in once a week, sometimes less often and sometimes I add or remove in the car while husband is driving) to pull out old coupons and add new ones.
Sometimes outside forces throw me off schedule. I just put out two and a half weeks of the kitchen pail garbage (meaning most of the first floor garbage). Why so much? Well, our garbage pickup is on Mondays and Thursdays. I normally put the kitchen garbage out on Sunday night for the Monday morning pickup. Monday last week (the 16th) was a legal holiday and there was no pickup. So, I planned to put it out on Wednesday night for Thursday - I forgot. We had a nor’easter here and the winds were suppose to start Monday morning. I did not want my garbage flying all over and did not put it out Sunday night - and I left the second week’s garbage bag in the pail in the kitchen as there was room in it and it did not smell. So, tonight I put out both bags for pickup tomorrow. I also have a mostly full bag of trash in our office, with smaller bags to be added to it from our bedroom and upstairs bathroom, but that can go out Sunday for Monday pickup next week. We don’t fill the office pail as quickly and it is mostly just paper. I also have two and a half weeks of recycling to go out - three weeks by Monday night when I will put it out for Tuesday pickup. Since Monday the 16th was a holiday, I forgot to put out the recycling for Tuesday. Then this past Monday/Tuesday we were still dealing with the nor’easter, so the recycling is sitting in the porch waiting to go. I will make two stacks of papers and use a larger box to put out the cans and bottles and they will be gone (well, at least as of now they say next Sunday to Tuesday should be nice weather). I put my newspapers out in cardboard boxes which we have gotten things in and recycle them at the same time.
I am trying to get back on some sort of schedule as I used to be to get it all done. I have writing my post for this blog down for Tuesday night - so it can be posted very late Wednesday night -which might technically be early Thursday morning. Many weeks I write it on Wednesday night. This week I was good and wrote it on Tuesday night, then thought about it, and revised it before posting it - it is much less rambling than it was as I originally wrote it.
Do you have a schedule or just do what you can when you can?
TODAY’S THOUGHT ON ORGANIZING - Any step forward is better than none. I mentioned previously to change one thing and follow through on it. It took almost 29 years in this house - along with 9 years of stuff from our apartment and over 25 years of stuff from before that to get us to where we are. It will not be gone quickly, even allowing for the fact that some of the stuff has already been gotten rid. But any step forward is that much less to do afterward.
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