C.H.A.O.S

... or, as the Flylady calls it, Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrom, which is pretty appropriate, really, since one follows the other.

We've been suffering from a bit of that around here, recently.

Well, to be perfectly honest, we always suffer from it a bit, but these past few weeks, with all three boys at home so much, it's been far worse than it normally is. 

We are not a tidy household. With kids, and cats and chickens, and an allotment and a big garden, and two parents who go out to work it's never all that tidy around here, and I don't mind that. I don't need or want a show home, and with all our hobbies and the limited time we have the cleaning and tidying isn't all that high on the agenda most days.

It does get me down, though, if it gets too bad, and occasionally we reach the point where I just want to get a bunch of big black binliners out and stuff all the rubbish (aka all the toys and clothes and general house 'debris' that accumulates day to day) in there and bring it to the tip. 

Such a point was reached on Saturday evening. I had a busy week at work last week, because the A-level results were out and we've had to man the phones all day every day since then to take calls from applicants ringing around to see if they could still get into the university course they wanted. With that, and the school holidays, the housework dropped off the radar for a bit, and it really doesn't take long for it to get out of hand. Coming back from work on the saturday and surveying the chaos all around us I reached a bit of a low point.

D and I spent some time on the Sunday getting things under control again, but I am hoping to come up with a more sustainable plan, because this 'binge-cleaning' isn't much fun and is also not a real solution because in the long-term you can't carry on like that. 

I used to follow the Flylady programme for a while before I fell of the bandwagon, and I think I might try to do that again. I like the idea of just doing a little bit of cleaning every day, and of focussing on deep-cleaning one room per week. The idea is to work at it, slowly but steadily, and because you are not supposed to get it all done in one day there is less chance of getting discouraged. 

So that's what I'm going to do, and to keep myself motivated I'll also force myself to post about it once a week, on a Tuesday. So here is my first room - the lounge, all tidy and clean again after the weekend - sorry, I didn't take any 'before' pictures, it was far too depressing! :) 

Fingers crossed that this will be how things continue!