We Clean High and Low

I had to come up with a project for CC in a hurry this week, because Shannon's hubby was home from work sick and she thought it would be better not to have the Club descend on their home when he needed to rest. So we looked around and found a few things that were in need of some work.



We settled on this little cabinet to start with. The picture at the top of the page is the view underneath (yuck!) and as you can see, the cabinet was such a mess inside that the door wouldn't even close properly. I wanted to clear it out and put back only the basic drawing and coloring supplies, so that we could easily get to them.

So Rachel fished for lost treasure with a yard stick,



And we sorted through all the papers and old coloring books in the cabinet.



Of course, Michael was close at hand barking out orders and trying to keep us slackers in line.



It wasn't long before the shelves were wiped out and we were putting things back into place. A quick and easy project! But one that will make a HUGE difference in our day to day lives. When we have drawing supplies within easy reach, it provides a quick and easy activity and helps transition us from one thing to the next. All 4 of my kids love to draw so much, and this makes it so much easier.



After we had some lunch, we checked my list and decided to tackle the other job I had written down, which was to clear the tops of my kitchen cabinets. This may not be a problem area for some people, but at nearly 6 feet tall, I tend to stick things up there to get them out of the way or just to deal with them later. I didn't even REALLY notice how much junk was up there until we started taking it all down. In fact, I suffered from an attack of camnesia there for a minute and did not get a photo until all the stuff was actually on the countertop. I almost made Rachel put it all back up there just for the sake of the picture, but that's another good thing about working in a group- they don't let you do ridiculous things like that. (Yes, I probably would have done it if I were working alone. It's the photo-perfectionist in me. And you thought all my photos were candid! HA!)



Rachel did all the dirty work this time. My hero! She got up there with the vacuum and a rag and knocked out the cleaning while Shannon and I put all the stuff where it belonged.




Michael was so proud of us, he was kicking his legs and doing cheers!



After everyone left, I stayed in the groove and got the stove cleaned and took out the compost (both long overdue) and loaded the dishwasher. My kitchen feels so great!

 







Another excellent meeting of the Cleaning Club. We got a lot accomplished and had time to sit and chat too. And my family felt the difference immediately- that clutter up above our heads was weighing us down! Everything feels more balanced and I can close my little corner cabinet again, which was completely messing up the chi in my special room. Yay!

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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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