It's Not Happenin'....

I often told myself when my girls were little that one day I'd have an organized home. It helped that we actually had to go through the process of leaving one home and moving into another. We built almost five years ago. When we went through that process we got rid of so much STUFF. Well, it has happened again...the accumulation of stuff over time. I don't get it...well, I guess in reality I should.

I may not have young children any longer, BUT I do have the stuff that comes from having daughters move into college, out of college, into dorms, out into apartments; plus I have a mother-in-law who moved into assisted living so we have a lot of her stuff here too.

One of the things I wanted was an attic space. I love our attic space. It is the kind of attic you can imagine loving as a kid. I am hoping that one day my grandchildren can go up there and dig through boxes and find what they think is cool stuff. Right now it does have some cool stuff, but it also has some not-so-cool stuff...in other words...junk.

I thought that when my kids grew up I'd be better at staying on top of clutter. Maybe I am a little better, but since I actually had a weekend of no commitments, I decided to get to some of the projects I set aside. I've started attacking some already junky drawers and such. How does that happen...even though I don't have any little ones any longer?

Big announcement: I have to face the fact that it is ME...not my daughters...and ED (who is much more of a keeper than I am). I managed to attack the drawer in my bathroom vanity where I keep make up and jewelry and such. Since it took me quite awhile to get that done and figure out what to do with the stuff I didn't need (much of it got thrown away), it is seriously clear that it will take weeks and weeks of having no commitments to get through it all.

It's probably not happenin'....by the time I get through them all, the first ones will be full again.

Hmmm...what I really should have done? Gotten rid of a bunch of Ed's junk since he is out of town. He'd never have noticed.

While I want my attic to maintain it's "cool appeal" for future use, it does definitely need some cleaning out, trips to donation centers, and organization. Maybe I'll take a before picture of it and get it posted...who knows whether the after picture will ever get posted in my life time.

It's not happenin'...at least not in the near future.

Too Too Much

I have been a bit "blogged" down (groan) with my posting. That is mostly because I've been working on house projects in anticipation of fall and winter.

I don't even know if we'll manage to get to the attic before it gets too cold, but Ed and I have been simultaneously attacking various parts of the house we naturally claim...mine is the den/library and his is the garage. I think I got in over my head.

I am in the process of cleaning off bookshelves...shelf by shelf. We have more than just books in our library. We have DVD's, CD's, various cords that belong with who knows what, stacks of music (written music) left from high school choirs and performances, violin music, guitar music, piano music, yearbooks from my oldest daughter Caitlin, who is 25, starting from K through high school (plus the other daughters' yearbooks), plus my and Ed's yearbooks...uh, let's see...a plastic container full of crayons and coloring books (Christmas coloring books which I refuse to throw away...go ahead and laugh...sometimes I still like to color), vinyl record albums (some of which I am sure are collectible), VCR tapes (movies and family videos), some of my mother-in-law's books (she is now residing in an assisted living facility), and some of my daughters' books too...plays, teacher books, etc., etc.

Are you overwhelmed yet? I am. As I said. I started feeling anxious by the time I was only half way through. What happens when you have that much stuff is that you don't know what to do with it. I'm not one to get rid of books, but it is time. I now have several grocery sacks, and a large plastic container of books sitting in the hall outside of the library. Ed will have to take a look at those, and so will the girls, and probably some of them will come back into the library.

I'll probably donate the paper backs and others I find of little value to the library or my school's 8th grade garage sale. There may be some that, although they no longer hold interest for us, may have value to someone else. For awhile I've thought about selling things on Amazon or Ebay. I'm not sure if it is worth the effort, but I might experiment and try a few.

Ed's area was the garage. His mother as mentioned moved to our town and is an assisted living facility, so not only do we have the aforementioned books of hers, but we have some pieces of furniture, boxes of photos, etc., some of which were in the garage....along with various other pieces of furniture from our daughters' dorms and apartments. He did take a few things to be donated today just to get them out of the garage. We haven't been able to park in one of the bays.

We have only been in this house five years this winter, and I have no idea how we could possibly have accumulated so much stuff, but I think it is from having college aged daughters, parents who are aging, and.....something that is going to stop, an addiction to books. I have a number of books I will keep, but I hereby vow to start going to the library or trading with friends.

Anyone up for a book exchange? Or better yet, forget the exchange, I don't need anymore...anyone up for a book giveaway?

Why is it that when you are watching a movie where there is a room with stacks of books and papers around, it seems so...so...quaint or artsy...like maybe in Finding Forester, but when it is your own house it doesn't feel that way?

Conspicuous Consumption

I don't think there is any hope for me. Last night I cleaned out a walk-in pantry and today the refrigerator. We've lived in our home less than five years, and I actually have completed both of these tasks a number of times. That means...when things are falling off shelves or out of the refrigerator when I open the doors. Another sign they need to be cleaned is when someone else in the family opens one of the doors and says "There's nothing to eat." even though both are crammed full. Oh, one more sign is when a guest in your home (particulary a friend of a teenage daughter...teens have no tact whatsoever...) opens the doors and mentions that they need to be cleaned out).

Well, it's done. And I have to live with a ton of recycling because the bin is full and I've had to resort to using another container to hold the surplus; the large garbage container is also full (I threw as much as I could into the garbage disposal, but you can't throw paper, cardboard, or non recyclable containers in a garbage disposal (hey, there's an idea of something someone should invent). The recycling will be picked up on Tuesday of next week and the garbage on Wednesday, so I have to live with it until then. I hope I sealed everything up tightly.

I'm marking this date on my calendar. I want to know if having let go of a lot the responsibilities that go along with being the mom of a high school aged child (FOREVER!) will make any difference in whether I have just one bag of powdered sugar in my pantry instead of five partial bags, or whether I discover things in my refrigerator I no longer can recognize.

All humor aside, I really do want to live in a way that avoids waste, especially when our country could probably feed the entire world.

Cleaning/Decluttering

For the ____th time (lost count) I am trying to follow a home maintenance/cleaning method that comes from a website you might (or might not, especially after you've looked it at) want to check out in detail. It's called Fly Lady and is a system of keeping your house clean. Like Weight Watchers I've signed up for it more times than I can count and have given up. I'm trying again. If you check it out, don't be overwhelmed by the information on the website. Just taking a few minutes each day will familiarize you with it.

The first thing to do is ignore most of it and follow the baby steps. Don't expect perfection or you won't do it. I skip some of the things, like leaving little sticky notes around the house for my husband, my kids, and myself, reminding us to do certain things. To me sticky notes add to the clutter of the place.

So just about three or four days ago, I started trying to get myself into a routine again. It's better to do this in the summer than when I am starting back to school. The first routines consist of things that normal people (who are not like me) do, such as keep the dishes out of their sink, make their beds, get dressed and put on shoes. Simple enough. Well, not really (not when you might roll out of your bed before your husband..why bother making a bed when you get home from work...note: maybe I should actually ask him to do it.) The first thing you do, and I think it is to impact you psychologically, is to clean your sink. Specific directions are given for this which amount to filling your sink up with hot water, adding bleach, letting it sit there, getting a sharp object to clean out the crud along the edges, etc., etc. Well, as hard as it is for me to admit it, there was an impact. Every day when I walk back and forth by that sink, it actually makes me feel good that at least that one thing is done.

They also recommend not sitting around in your PJ's until noon (drat, I was afraid of that). Well, that works too. It really does make you feel better to get up, get showered, put on your clothes, put on your face and so forth. But they are NOT going to take away from me a few minutes to sit and enjoy my cup of coffee, sit on the deck and maybe read the paper or a chapter or two. Oh, and you can't put on just any shoes; you have to put on shoes that tie so you won't be prone to kicking them off and sitting around. Not me, no sir. I've been through two foot surgeries in the past four or five years just to be ABLE to wear sandals and show off my painted toes, so the heck with that.

If you sign up for this you will receive numerous emails consisting of zone cleaning projects (which are pretty fast and can make a difference over a long period of time), and testimonials from other people (which I'm not interested in). The whole thing seems a bit OCD to me. The point of keeping an organized clean home is doing it without having to obsess over it and so you feel like you have lots of time for more interesting things (like writing in your Blog).

I can't figure out how these women, if they are keeping their homes clutter free and clean, possibly have time to run this massive website. The only thing I can figure, is that they actually have hired someone else to clean their homes and don't follow their own system at all. Check it out and let me know what you think. Above all, don't expect perfection. After all, perfection is no fun and boring.

Book Smart People

Yesterday one of my daughters called me from the kitchen to say the dishwasher was leaking. I would consider this dishwasher new because we recently replaced the one that we purchased when building our house. When you are building a house, you try to cut every possible corner, and we didn't pick the highest grade of appliances. So I'm muttering a few choice things. I go to the kitchen and what I see is soap suds spewing out the sides of the dishwasher.

"Ok, who started the dishwasher?" It was another daughter who called from another room that she had.

"What soap did you put in it?"

"That liquid soap under the sink." (I'm thinking I didn't have any liquid dishwasher soap). I was right. I pulled out the bulk container of "dish" soap and asked her if that is what she used. By this time she had appeared in the kitchen (and I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that someone besides me even started the dishwasher).

"Yes. That's what I've used before."

"No, it isn't. What you used before was liquid yes, but it was in a green bottle and it says 'Cascade' on the front."

In case you don't know, regular dish soap is made to produce a lot of suds. Dishwasher soap is absent that ingredient for the obvious reason. I wouldn't have known this except I remember the wife of one of Ed's law school buddies told us a similar story about her husband putting regular dish soap in the dishwasher and the mess it made. I really didn't grow up with a dishwasher, so might not have known that myself if I hadn't heard this story.

So, what is similar about these stories? Well, think about it. The man who did this to his wife was a law school graduate...he's smart. The daughter who did this to me graduated 13th in her class. She is going into the honors program at DePaul to study biology and chemistry, with possibly a minor in Spanish and/or Theater. She wants to maybe go to medical school. She just got a 4 in Calculus and a number of 3's in other areas on her AP exams and already has a good amount of college credit....she's smart.

There is another issue here. What does this say about me as a mother and how many times I've actually demanded that my daughter(s) do the dishes?

I'm now in the process of teaching her to do laundry, starting with the towels we used to sop up all the soapy hot water inside the dishwasher and all over the floor.

"But mom, this is clean water. Can't we just put the towels right in the dryer?"