Organisation Update - Week Two

UPDATE: I thought I posted this on Monday night, I must have been REALLY tired because I just found it in my drafts folder. Mumma brain strikes again!

Well the end of last week was so much BLAH... with little Frog unwell and the rest of us alternately exhausted and coming down with her bug as well.

I'd managed two days out of five for our first week of The Organised Housewife's 20 Day Challenge. I was a bit cross with myself, and with the universe for dumping everything on us the second we relaxed a bit.

Never mind, I thought, just pour a cup of tea and get on with the job.

This week I did, in spectacular fashion!

We may have gone slightly off the plan this weekend, but only because a new addition forced a total furniture reshuffle. The upside is that we have a lounge and three bedrooms that actually LOOK like they are lived in! Not just stark rooms with a bed/chairs.

This house is actually starting to look and feel like our home. Because we rent, and because we moved so often and had so little furniture we have spent the last five years looking like we were "camping" in whatever house we were in. 

Which reminded me... in October I will have known WonderMan for five years, that's when we met, and we will have been engaged for 4 years and 9 months which is probably getting on to be ridiculous but one day, one glorious day, we will get around to getting married. But not next year as we hoped. Bother.

I'm very easily distracted today, can you tell?

Right cleaning. Yes.

Day Six - Bathroom

We have two bathrooms, one main one which is the kids bathroom, and an ensuite off our bedroom. 

And they are not my job. So I didn't clean them. WonderMan did. He does one during the week and the other on a Saturday. This is working really well and I'm happy with his standard of cleaning so I don't interfere! I do clean the toilets one extra time each week because I hate grotty toilets. And I really really don't like toilets in bathrooms like we have in our ensuite. 

But I did reorganise them, see?

WonderMan was always telling me off about this cupboard!

Not any more!

Day Seven - Fridge

Woo! I already cleaned my fridge on a whim just before starting the challenge. I'm trying to keep it tidy and give it a quick wipe each week.

We were also tasked to declutter our cookbooks. 

I have a fair few of those! And a mountain of clippings from magazines. I tidied the bookshelf during the first week, but hadn't yet done anything with the clippings. I took Katrina's fantastic idea and organised them all into an expanding file, chucking out quite a few along the way! The file also fits neatly into my cookbook cupboard, perfect! I have removed a couple of rarely used cookbooks to be sold/donated, whatever is easiest. What's left is a well used collection, definitely no dust collectors left!

Our new habit was to meal plan - I do this every week as we are on a strict grocery budget. I never used to plan lunches but this week I included a few recipes I could make anytime and store in the fridge. This made a nice change from vegemite sandwiches!

My meal plan is generally just a list on a notepad. I am yet to find a nice printable, that doesn't also contain a pathetically small space for your grocery list! How are the ingredients for 14 meals going to fit on ten tiny lines? If you find a great menu plan with matching separate shopping list printable let me know in the comments!


Day Eight -  Spare room / kids toy room / craft room

We don't really have a proper spare room, we have a second living area that I use as a sewing room. It's also where we enter and leave the house every day as we are on a sloped block and the driveway leads to this door. Off this room leads our bedroom. There is also a big open window space looking into the kitchen which gives us a great view of the kids outside when we are doing things in this part of the house. It's a gorgeous light filled area but doesn't seem to fit anything I want to do with it. We trialled it is our lounge room but finally settled on the formal lounge and dining area at the front of the house. 

One of my goals was to create a space where guests could stay in comfort. It's a little difficult to do this because we only have three bedrooms and there is NO WAY I am making my girls share a room. My hair would go grey overnight!

Now that I have cleaned and decluttered this space though, I have formulated a plan. Eventually the ping pong table will go when I get my dad's much loved leather top office desk. A sofa bed and large screen will allow me to use the space to sew and let the kids play, but also turn into a comfortable and private sleeping area for guests. Ikea and I will have to have a look at some sneaky storage solutions for people's clothes etc. 

We are well on our way to making good use of this space.

Day Nine - Junk drawer.

I haven't done this one yet, because I don't have much of a junk drawer. More like a series of junk cupboards! I will take a rain check on this one and make it up next week.

Day Ten - Oven.

This is the one that I always procrastinate until it's time for us to move. Then I scrub the bejeezers out of it until it is sparklier than it's probably been for the last five tenants. Meaning I am never the one who gets to enjoy the clean sparkly oven. I am well aware of how stupidly backwards this system is.

This oven was pretty clean when we moved in but it was pretty obvious the glass front only got a cursory wipe over as evidenced by my first baking picture on Instagram:

I promise to do it this week. Promise.

Finally, I caught up on some of last week's tasks.

The lounge room (featuring our new garage sale couch which occasioned the Great Furniture Shuffle):

The laundry: Yet to replace the gigantic basket with separate sorting baskets but it's on the list.

I've also progressively vacuumed, scrubbed and mopped the floors this week as well. Next month I will shampoo all the carpets to remove the build up of winter dirt and give us a fresh start for Spring/Summer.

It's been a massive week, and everyone in the family has been involved with helping and organising. Hopefully by tackling this challenge as a group the responsibility will not fall back on just me in the future.
 

Organisation Update - The Organised Housewife 20 Day Challenge

I'm following The Organised Housewife's 20 Days to Clean and Organise Your Home Challenge!

And.... I'm already behind... nuts.

Days one and two rocked! My kitchen got a much needed going over, although I was able to cheat a little in places because I happened to wipe the cupboards down on the weekend. I have been keeping an eye on them and spot wiping them as part of my morning/after breakfast tidy up though.

Frog helped me do the dishes :)

WonderMan just shook his head when he opened the cupboard and saw the space labelled "dish detergents"

Shiny happy clean kitchen!

Our bedroom has nothing much to clean, just declutter the small piles on each side of the bed where we don't have bedside tables. *SIGH*

So that took relatively little time, but I did discover a cobweb at the back of my bedhead that could have meant some nasty creepy crawly visiting me in the middle of the night, I removed that quick smart! 

A garage sale provided me with a small Ikea table which has become my temporary bedside table to hold my mountain of books off the floor. The larger table which came with it is destined to become the lounge room play table, giving us a chance to remove most of the toys back to bedrooms and back into a rotation system.

But I am afraid this is where all the shiny happy ends because I got called in to work for an extra day, and then we went away for an extended weekend. 

Today, my kitchen is telling me off for piling all this clutter back in there and I can't remember when the last time I vacuumed the floors was. Such is the life of a temp, and a mother who can suddenly find herself with a sick child on top of her weekend away.

Today has been about regaining the essential routines. 
I collected all the washing in the house and started after breakfast to ensure I got most of it dry before the next couple of rainy days due tomorrow.  

I helped the girls to follow their morning routines which made school drop off simple and stress free. (Well not quite; Tiger dumped the contents of her suitcase in the laundry instead of putting her clean clothes away and I thought I would teach her a lesson by washing it and making her put it away anyway. Turns out every piece of underwear she had was in there.... DAMN!)

I wrote a to do list of small jobs that I had been putting off for ages, like dropping off WonderMan's watch to have a link removed, and posting a couple of letters I kept forgetting. Frog and I spent a relaxed hour down in town running errands.

I'm now off to reclaim my shiny kitchen, and remove the toy cupboard from the lounge room so I can start keeping the room clean and simple. 

With Frog home this week (but not miserable anymore) after nasty ear infection on the weekend, I'm hoping to catch up with the challenge to help us regain some order, and some family time next weekend! 

How are you going with your challenge? 

A New Challenge - with The Organised Housewife

Here comes September at a rate of knots and with it, a challenge that could not have been more perfect for our life right now!

I've sung (The Organised Housewife) Katrina's praises before - I love the way she shares her ideas, routines, and her always gorgeous printables. I also love that she's not afraid to admit that she's not perfect, and that sometimes life can knock you for six, and it takes an effort to get back into the swing of things.

Her 20 Days To Organise and Clean Your Home Challenge is the answer for the times when life gets in the way and you need a kick start. 

I had an epic EPIC meltdown on the weekend, one of the "Why am I doing everything and why can't you all just do things my way and for God's sake turn of that damn tv or I will stab you" emotional, screaming, messy meltdown.

I crave order and control and I have been let down enough to not feel like I can't rely on anyone. Everytime we start again, everything goes well for a day or two, maybe even a week, but then everyone dies off, the same old habits creep back in and we find ourselves back at square one.

I had signed up to Katrina's challenge as soon as I saw her post appear in my feed, and I'm glad that for once, we are not trying to navigate through a kick start on our own. This time we are going to make some new habits, and everyone in the family is getting involved.

Well, you know, she's not going to mend my fragile state, and glue the shattered relationship back together for me (oh if it were that simple) but a reset in our organisation - our day to day tasks, knowing that things are done so we can all get back to eating pancakes and going for long walks on Sundays - that's going to do a lot for my control freak head, and this little family's hearts.

And if you're not, you know, NUTS, like I obviously am, it's a good way to make Spring Cleaning a lot of fun this year!

There's still time to sign up for the 20 Days to Organise and Clean Your Home Challenge... you just need to go here:

What are you waiting for? Go join, I'll wait here.

*cue elevator music*

Okay, so it's pre-season week, and the first task is to set up a binder for all the routines, lists and lovely printy things that we will be using throughout the challenge. 

I have already repurposed every binder I own... so today I purchased a heeky lime green one that everyone can recognise easily, and which will match my kitchen, where it will live.

While I was over at The Organised Housewife I also downloaded the printable monthly calendar for September, which you can see poking out from the bottom. I have always told myself I would use these, but true to form I forget and by the time I remember it's almost time for the next month.

I printed it out and filled it in straight away and it's on my pinboard in the kitchen. No more excuses of the "I didn't know" or "I forgot" or "You didn't tell me" variety. And did I mention there are three different styles so you can choose the one you like best?

Katrina, you sure know the way to a stationery-obsessed girl's heart. 

Day Two of pre-season is to assemble your clean kit, so pop back tomorrow to see how mine looks, and share yours with all the budding "Organised Housewives" joining the challenge.