Month: May 2011

I looked ahead and saw that Day 6 was to clean out your kitchen cabinets and Day 7 was to clean out your pantry. So last week I only did 2 days of the 31 days to clean. Why? Because we have a pretty huge pantry/laundry room. Due to the fact that it has a door that closes it pretty much gets a ton of stuff just tossed in there.  So I made a quick decision to start with the pantry and finish with the cabinets. So it took about 7 hours over the course of 4 days to finish. Whew! At that point I decided I was taking Friday off and then I did all the normal housecleaning on Saturday morning.

I found a ton of stuff to toss, donate and recycle. So much that Mike said, “No more spring cleaning if it involves trash.” (we only have trash pick up once a week in our neighborhood and the can was full) That really made me laugh.

I finished the laundry room side first and even did all the ironing:

Here is the pantry side part way through – at one point I found 11 packages of free batteries from Staples; SCORE!  I also want to point out that I touched EVERY SINGLE thing in this pantry. It was picked up, examined and a decision was made with what to do with it. That is what took so long.

I used a lot of plastic shoe boxes to get stuff put together by type. Finished!

Look you can see and walk on the floor. YIPPIE!

The next thing we will do is add one more set of shelves on the wall you can’t see. I asked Mike if we could do that to put all the homeschool and craft supplies on so I could have them in one place. Very excited about that!

I didn’t take any before and after photos of the cabinets, but they are totally straight and everything has a home. I love opening them to get stuff and finding that everything is in order and EASY to find. And I think that this is the point of the book – really getting a handle on the clutter and mess of your house so that doing your daily work isn’t so discouraging and out of control.

Now for the book part of the week. Day 6 talked about making a “6 list”. Basically before you go to bed make a list of the top 6 things you want to do the next day. Get up and do them in order. If you don’t finish move those up to the top of the list the next day. The Mary Challenge was to do this for 6 days straight. One day I had 19 things on my 6 list so I don’t think I was following too well. HA!

Day 7 was about the curse and how all of creation is moving towards decay. I don’t want to give too much of the book away in case you read it, but basically we will always have more laundry to do and more dishes to wash. So how are you going to look at it? Will it be a burden or will you see it for what it really is?

The thing I am noticing the most through all of this is that I want to keep the stuff that I already cleaned, clean! I don’t want the stove top to get so messy again or the laundry room to have piles of stuff. And it really is easier to keep up with stuff if you just take care of it on the spot.