Creating Manland

It’s really funny that my post is on the heels of Rachel’s, because yesterday I was seriously ready to call this whole thing quits. My kids decided to more or less refuse to clean up the remnants from having their friends here during Cleaning Club. Four hours later the house was still not put all back together. I was sure that we’d just have to skip our house from now on--because I just could not deal with the fallout from Cleaning Club any more. Fast forward to 10:00pm when my husband expressed the. most. sincere. gratitude for finishing up the room he’ll use as his study, and I remembered just how worthwhile it all is- even in the face of the worst post-cleaning club apocalypse.



This room had been the dumping ground since we moved. We had agreed that we’d just leave the unsorted boxes in that room to deal with later. Later was apparently becoming never. It was one of those truly awful jobs that nobody wants to do. I know my husband was completely overwhelmed at the thought of tackling this room. I think it's safe to say that it was a job which none of us wanted to really do either. I honestly wanted to quit about halfway through, and if I was on my own without Rachel and Jennifer, I most certainly would have stopped right then, mid-project, with an even bigger mess than the room had been.



In addition to figuring out what to do with the boxes of complete randomness, this task was also destined to include straightening out the shed so that we could stack the boxes of books that didn't fit on our shelves, as well as the few boxes which would need to be sorted sometime in the future. I hadn’t really planned on that organizing of the shed--but the need became apparent as the task progressed. Well... really as soon as I opened the shed door.







It’s been a rough few months around the Shannon-house. With moving, unpacking, the birth of our sixth baby, my extremely slow physical recovery, my constant battle with postpartum depression, a flooding septic system and crawl space, the subsequent repairs for those issues which lingered unfinished for two months, and most recently the death of my father-in-law things have been super stressful . Things have been especially difficult for my husband, and I know he has felt really kind of inundated when he is home.



Giving him a space, his own space in our new home will hopefully help him feel the love with which his room was cleared and created. And when you get down to it, that really is the essence of Cleaning Club now--love. It is love for one another and for ourselves and our families which drives our projects. We want to make our homes better places for living and loving. And well, the truth is -as we all know- love is messy. Some weeks it’s really messy. But without love- I know I’d be lost.