Hitting the Big Time

Well, I guess hitting the big time would mean we were booked on Oprah, but for me personally seeing my vision of room swapping come to fruition was pretty huge for me.



After cleaning out my office, Jennifer and Shannon (and especially Michael) would not rest until the whole project was done. So the following Monday we gathered here again, but this time back to "normal" with a house full of kids. I have to say, I like it that way.





We jumped right into dealing with the giant desk in what was my office/closet/hovel. It was too big to fit out the door intact. Jennifer is the most mechanically minded and tool adept, so she took the lead on the desk demo. We had that beast demolished in no time. The fact that we had workers here fixing rotted wood on our deck meant that we were able to add the demolished desk bits to their existing scrap pile headed to the dump. This pile was located conveniently right outside my bedroom window.



Don't throw the baby out with the desk bits!



We relocated my desktop to the upstairs great room, a move I've really enjoyed. The computer is in the middle of the goings-on in the house now, and I am forced to keep my desk clean.

The desk out, we we able to vacuum the office now closet(or rather employ a nearby child to vacuum it), and installed a new shelf with a hanging bar to match the other two in there. We gathered Joe and my clothes and shoes from their previous various locations around the house and viola! we had a closet!













The move also freed up space in other closets! (Funny. Organizing this closet that Stella is in was the very first Cleaning Club project we did at my house. And there we were undoing it.)


With the office relocated, the room swap could happen. Jennifer and Shannon (and Michael) came back on Saturday, while Joe was out of town, and we completed the move. This was no small task. We removed all the doors from their hinges, and moved several big pieces of furniture. Just trying to figure out what order to do things in was enough to make my brain freeze up and I'd have to control, alt, delete and then hard reboot to make it work again.









Things looked stalled for a moment when we couldn't get the couch through the doorway of the old den, but we finally figured out that the legs could be screwed off and there was much rejoicing. And because Cleaning Club encourages doing things right, and Michael won't stand for anything less, we vacuumed every inch of carpet, wiped baseboards as we went, and even sucked out all the crazy stuff that gathered under couch and chair cushions.



It took three hours but the results were so utterly worth it.

My new den.





My new bedroom.





I could have never, ever been able to do this by myself. The fact that my friends seemed almost as excited about this for our family as I was was such a bonus.

Joe came home Sunday night and was blown away. He could not get over the fact that S and J had been willing to put so much effort into the project, and that we'd pulled it all off.

I feel like I'm in someone else's house, or at a fine hotel in my new bedroom. I love that I have a view of the woods now, and there is enough space for my dog to sleep on the floor at the foot of our bed and I don't have to climb over her to get into bed. Our mornings are so much more streamlined, and I think it's especially helped Joe to be able have all his clothes in one place.

The new den works just fine. We'll look for some smaller furniture so it's not so crammed in there, but for now it totally works. Michael kept muttering that the chi was "all whack" and tried to push his Feng Shui ideas on me but I was all, go play with your toes or something! It's going to have to do for now! And he did, cause he's a good baby like that.

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Looking for a Change

We've been in our house for almost seven years and I guess we're getting itchy.

Joe and I currently have the smallest bedroom in the house, which you may remember also houses the laundry room. At one point recently, Joe broke down and was all I work so hard and I sleep in the laundry room and I don't even have my own closet!

I started thinking creatively and decided that I really don't need my current office/closet/hovel. I don't need 90% of what's in there. All I really need is a surface to put a computer on and a surface to write on. That done, we could switch our bedroom with the room we use as a den and suddenly we'd have a grown-up bedroom! With a private door to the bathroom, sliding glass doors out to our own part of the deck, and beautiful view of the woods! But, most importantly, we'd NOT have a washer and dryer in our closet, we'd have a real live closet! A big one. One that can house Joe's huge stash of shoes!

It was a totally bizarro world Cleaning Club that day. The timing was weird, and for most of the time there were only three children here. Wha?! Yeah, it was weird.

The task at hand was helping me finish packing up my office/closet/hovel. I'd already packed several boxes and they were sitting, abandoned in the foyer.



We figured out where everything was going and moved several boxes to the garage and all the donated stuff Jennifer loaded up in her truck and took to donate for me (have I mentioned what a huge relief her willingness to do this is to me? I have, so pay better attention!)


We packed up the rest of the stuff in my office, dealing with where everything should go and talking me through the emotions involved in packing away so many years.



We found new places for things, got rid of stuff, and in what felt like no time my office/closet/hovel was empty (short of the giant desk that will need to be disassembled in there. See next week for Cleaning Club: The Demolition Edition!).



It was really amazing what we got done in a little over an hour. Stuff that I'd walked by over and over all week, not wanting to deal with carrying it all to the garage, and not really even knowing what to do with half of it, was cleared out and the task completed with what felt like only minimal effort.



This is the crux of cleaning club: It's practical, it's personal, and damnit I'm going to go ahead and say it's downright revolutionary.

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Overdue

This post is long overdue. Several things were going on that kept me from getting my post up last week. One of which included picture issues. I don't want to blame anyone, so let's just say it rhymes with Bennifer borgot her bamera. So, I took my own pictures. Then I couldn't find the camera when I was ready to post. Then I just clean forgot to post (see how I masterfully worked in a Cleaning Club pun right there in the middle of that shameless blame-shifting paragraph?).

And also? I became an aunt (by blood. don't want to discount any of my twenty lovely nieces and nephews by marriage)! Here is a picture of my daughter with my new niece Cora.


Cora's much anticipated birth came a week after her due date, while I was anxiously waiting in the hospital waiting room as planned. Where anxiously waiting in the hospital waiting room as planned equals away on vacation. So, when I got back there was much baby holding and baby sniffing and such to be done and by the time Cleaning Club arrived on Monday morning, I just needed help. Period. On no particular project, but just in general.

The house was a wreck. The luggage was still out. The laundry was strewn about. The dishwasher needed emptying.




Michael, of course, was in the thick of things.


We emptied and put away the luggage in the attic, and processed laundry.



We emptied the dishwasher.


Jennifer vacuumed the rugs.



Shannon got a wild hair and tackled the spider webs on the front porch.


Michael was cold chillin'. In the cutest pose possible.


Getting unpacked and cleaned up really helped me feel ready for a week of intense baby visiting and the final days before a breast cancer fundraiser I'd been working on for months. It was perfect. (Not getting my post up before the next Cleaning Club rolled around, not so perfect. )

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Helping a Brother Out

My husband Joe has a lot of clothes. Way more than I do. And although he is the hardest working person I know, the poor guy comes home to share the smallest bedroom in the house and no closet (the one in our room houses our washer and dryer). As my grandma would say, that's a fine how do you do! Joe's clothes are therefore in several places around the house: in his dresser, on the shelf in our closet/laundry room, in my daughter's closet upstairs, and in the hallway closet I use for my hanging clothes. Until Cleaning Club this week there was no real rhyme or reason to what went where.

To top it off, Joe and my two kids were in a car accident on the Friday before Cleaning Club that totaled his car. They are all fine, but the residual emotional stress and the work necessary to deal with the aftermath were taxing on all of us this weekend and I didn't really know what we were going to do when Cleaning Club arrived Monday morning. And although nothing physically happened to me, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed and really looking forward to having Shannon and Jennifer here with me, regardless of what we accomplished.

Once they were here I was able to think through what I wanted to do (which started with emptying my dishwasher and reloading it, as doing anything else here while the dishes sat there seemed silly): something to help organize Joe's clothes world better.

We emptied out the shelf in the laundry closet which was loaded down with sweaters and sweatshirts that neither of us really ever wear.


We sorted through them and loaded up a couple big bags of donations (which Jennifer quietly loaded off to take to Goodwill for me, a huge help). We were left with a tiny stack of my sweaters that went back on the shelf.


We decided to divide Joe's clothes into dress clothes and casual clothes. Dress clothes would go upstairs in his half of my daughter's closet, and casual would stay downstairs in his dresser. We went through his dresser drawers and refolded and reorganized them. We moved anything dressy up to the upstairs closet and did some rearranging and cleaning out while we were there.



We put all his ties on a hanger and all his underwear and socks in these hanging baskets. Look, Joe's underwear! This blog is no longer PG.


Joe was so thankful when he saw what we'd done. Not only did his clothes make sense now, but the sweaters above the dryer had worried him (apparently a fire hazard). I think it made him feel loved to have our little team working on something just for him.

A funny side story: A couple days after CC, Jennifer's daughter spent the night with my daughter. The two girls apparently got the Cleaning Club bug and spent hours cleaning my house! They dusted and washed windows and organized and scrubbed and decorated in almost every room in the house. It was amazing!


Beware: Cleaning Club is catching!

A note on photos: Jennifer didn't bring her camera this week, so we used our point and shoot. And we forgot to get any of Michael, who was of course in the middle of it all barking orders.

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The Project with Multiple Benefits

One thing we've never really done before is a project in one of our (count 'em twelve) kids' bedrooms. Of course, many of our projects benefit our kids (arguably all of them do since they make their mamas happy), but, today it would directly benefit my son Luke, whose closet desperately needed tending.


It was crammed and cluttered and with the recent addition of several toys that contain seventyhundredjillion pieces, everything was just stock-piling and it was one of those things in the Stuff to Get to Someday area of my brain.


While considering cleaning out and reorganizing Luke's closet, I realized that this project would also help me remedy one of those minor hassles of Cleaning Club that Shannon so eloquently described in her last post, namely: the cleaning up after having a house full of kids thing (or as Shannon described it, the "post-cleaning club apocalypse." But, she's prone to hyperbole. A rhetorical device I would never in a million years consider using!)


Because of the aforementioned seventyhundredgazillion piece toy fetish Luke has, his room is often ground zero for the mess- making. This is true not only of times we host Cleaning Club, but when we host parties or friends with younger kids. So, in cleaning out Luke's closet, we were able to free up space to stash most of those containers of toys up high, AND I pulled out several things that he doesn't play with anymore to put in the hall closet so we can pull those things out for our littlest visitors to play with in the main living area of the house. Perfect!


Michael oversaw the efforts, and only once mentioned an OSHA violation.


Also, lucky for us we had not one but two superheroes on the premises (just in case).


We started by taking off the doors of the closet. This allowed us to move over the dresser in there to free up more floor space on one side and makes for easier access all around. Then we took every thing out of the closet and piled it all up around Michael, like some kind of offering, and we vacuumed the rug in there.


We sorted everything--trash, recycling, donate, send home with another Cleaning Clubber, and move to another part of the house--and then put back a few things and added more containers of toys that had been on the ground. And the Spilling Over Effect I mentioned in my last post happened again when we ended up sorting and dusting Luke's shelves while we were at it (thanks to Shannon taking the initiative). After lunch we cleared out everything that was leaving the room and delivered it to its rightful place (including Jennifer taking away my donations piles, which I so appreciate her always offering to do).
 

The effects were immediately evident as Luke was thrilled to see his new closet, the little kids had a great time with all the stuff now set aside for them, and the clean up was quick and done before everyone left. And later that night, when two other younger kids came over to visit, the room stayed clean easily, too.


I loved the way Cleaning Club worked today. It was a high I rode for the rest of the day and brought with it a solution that will help in the future, too.

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