So my Purge and Clean is done for the summer….yes, I sucked at blogging about it…maybe I’ll drag out some more pics and blog some more about it soon, if I can find the time…but suffice it to say that I KICKED some serious BUTT on my house! I am VERY PLEASED with the outcome!!
If you’d like to see my completely thorough spreadsheet of all that I did this summary, check it out here. I tweaked it constantly all summer, and continue to tweak as I work through it, adding notes on what I accomplished and what I plan to accomplish. It’s really helped me stay focused and makes me feel good to see all that I did accomplish.
Quick summary: I spent 8 out of the past 9 weeks (took a week off for party planning on my son’s 10th birthday party) working my way through my house, room by room, decluttering, reorganizing (where appropriate) and thoroughly cleaning the hell outta things. Like I never have time for during our homeschool year.
Note: This allows me to not stress over the house so much during the year on the decluttering and deeper, bigger jobs because I know I will get to it over the summer every year. It really feels good to know I WILL get to it over the summer, so I just don’t worry about it during the year. This was my THIRD SUMMER doing this, and it’s like (seriously) the only thing I’ve been able to do consistently that ACTUALLY WORKS with this A.D.D. brain! Holy cow! Something that WORKS!!! I’m sticking with it!!
Through very strategic planning, I was able to do not only my entire house, but my yard and shed as well, and feel like I am ready to tackle planning for my new homeschool year now that my house is in a better place now.
Now granted, my house quickly devolves back into a lived-in mess…but it isn’t hard to bring it back up to clean again. And I’m very comforted knowing that the closets and cupboards and out of traffic areas are free of clutter and are well organized still. 🙂 It’s amazing how extremely comforting that really is!! Like a feeling a peace in the back of my brain all the time. It’s amazing. Clutter and chaos is really so stressful and damaging….didn’t realize how much so until I started clearing it out.
Anyway, case in point about the devolving of my house back into a lived-in mess, the first room I worked on this summer was the art/school area of our “Big Room”, which is our garage conversion that serves as our school room/play room….which is one of the most used rooms in the house….so here’s how the summer started:
(click on the thumbnails to see full images)
Here’s how the room looked after I totally cleaned up and reorganize the room and replaced the one table with 2 individual tables (still haven’t gotten the wall stuff done yet, hence the barren walls):
YAY! Art dresser is cleaned and organized now!!
Both work stations complete w/new, longer legs!
Happy campers.
And then here’s how it looks today:
Yeah….well, at least they’re using it, eh? Lots of creative stuff happening in there!
But time for me to roll up my non-existent sleeves (it’s HOT in Fresno in summer! No stinkin sleeves here in July!) and get to work again because the school year is fast approaching!!!
In the process of re-organizing that space I’m going to be finally figuring out exactly how I want our stations to work this year…since I’ve taken out some of the furniture I used for stations (the shelves I used for the “Play Something” station, for one), I need to rethink things….so I’m not just talking cleaning and reorganizing again here (and yes, I do have to still reorganize…because when I did my initial reorganize back in May, I did it knowing that I hadn’t actually done it fully to my liking…there were many things I didn’t like and knew I’d have to get back to)….I’m talking lots of thinking and planning I’ll be working on today and the rest of this week…..
Time to get to work!! Updates to come!!!
