Tidy House Tuesday

The Flylady schedule this week has moved on to the master bedroom, but I've had a major clear-out there a while ago so this is one room that isn't bad at all. I may do some of the tasks (dusting is something that always seems to be required in a bedroom...), but I think I might instead divide my attention between the lounge and the utility room/lean-to. The lounge is always in need of attention, because as the room in which the family spends most of their waking hours it's also the most battered of all rooms and can always do with a little tlc.

The lean-to / utility area is probably my least loved room in the entire house. The lean-to is a disaster. It was here when we first moved and it's one of those unredeemingly ugly late additions to a period property that you just wish you could pull down entirely. It's not in keeping with the style of the house, it looks bad, it's too narrow to provide any useful space, it's absolutely freezing in winter, and, to top it all, it now leaks like a sive. 

D has been putting plastic sheeting over the cracked glass panes of the roof for a few years now, because since it is so ugly we have not wanted to throw any money at it, but the rafters are rotten and it's always damp and awful in there. We've not wanted to get rid of it entirely, though, because it does house the washing machine and an extra freezer which otherwise would have no space, and there is also a downstairs toilet to the side of it which, although nearly unusable in winter (can I say FREEZING!) is really useful in the summer months as an outside toilet that the boys in particular use a lot when they are in the garden. 

Over the years we have tried a variety of ways to make this awkward space more usable. We have tried to clear the way to the washing machine at the end, but because it's a utility area / mud room, things end up piling up anyway, we've put shelves / cup boards along the side house all the stuff that accumulates there (which have had the effect of making the gangway to the washing machine even more narrow), we've put hooks up for coats and bike helmets, etc. 

What I'd like to do is pull the whole thing down, knock through the wall between the lean-to and the kitchen and the tiny 5-room corridor that connects the kitchen to the dining room, hall, and the lean-to (the other two doors are the kitchen door and the pantry door), and re-build the lean-to by replacing it with a more generously sized extension with large bi-fold doors to the garden. This way we could let light into the dingy kitchen (since it's one window looks not into the garden but into the lean-to!), and make it into a large L-shaped kitchen-diner/family room. 

There are no such plans, though, so for now we carry on. D has just replaced the plastic sheeting, after a recent downpour revealed that new leaks had appeared...

I'm going to try to bring some order into this space this week, if only so I can push my way to the washing machine without bumping into all sorts of things on the way!

I wonder what progress I can make in this space?!*

What are you organising and tidying this week? I'd love the hear from you so leave a note or share a link to a blog entry if you like - tidying isn't my favourite thing in the world, but it's better with some company. ;)



* I can't believee I'm even showing this disgrace of a utility area to anyone!!

Tidy Home Tuesday

... on a Wednesday, but never mind that. I was at work yesterday and didn't get round to taking pictures!

The Flylady commands me to work on my bathroom and one other room this week.

The bathroom always needs work, but it rarely gets neglected, because, well, a neglected bathroom is pretty gross, and with three little boys whose... aim... is often less than perfect it would get pretty awful pretty fast if I didn't stay on top of cleaning in that room at the very least. That said, I will make sure to give it some extra tlc this week. ;) 

For my one additional room I've chosen boy #1's  bedroom. This room does see some neglect. It's partly because boy #1 isn't the worst offender when it comes to toy chaos. He doesn't have much in his room and, for play, usually ends up 'visiting' his brothers in their rooms. This means that apart from his engineering/building projects, books, and loombands there isn't that much to go wrong in his own room. The biggest menace in there is definitely the loombands, which spill everywhere. I tend to hoover up hundreds of them every time! I'm not really sure how it happens, to be honest, because he doesn't really play with them much anymore (Mummy! Loombands are SO last year!), but they are All. Over. The. Floor.

His room is also tucked away right at the top of the house, next to my office, and that means that often, by the time I've done the rest of the house, I don't have enough energy (or motivation) left to attend to his room as well. 

All in all it's not a room that is very regularly tidied so it could do with some attention.

The task yesterday was to spend 5 minutes in there, just throwing away all the stuff that should have been thrown out or recycled ages ago. 

5 minutes? I can do that...

But that said, there are limits to what can be achieved in a kids room I think. After all, I am not aiming for magazine-cover-perfect, merely for tidy and clean. And it's his room after all, with his things and his art work, and I kind of like it that way. :)

What are you tidying and organising this week? 

Tidy Home Tuesday - in the craft room...

I'm a bit under the weather today. 

It started yesterday morning, with a sore throat, and by the evening the thing had evolved into a fully fleded feverish cold, complete with shivers, achey limbs and a blocked nose. Wonderful.

Dosed up with Iboprofen and Paracetamol I've been able to function this morning, and good job too, as it is the boys' first day back at school! Once they were dropped off I was supposed to work, but have you ever tried to write when your head aches and you can hardly keep your eyes open? 

Instead I decided to accept that I wasn't going to achieve any great intellectual feats today and instead concentrated on tidying and organising. The Flylady focusses on the kitchen this week, but as the busiest room in the house I don't find that the kitchen is neglected a lot. I frequently go through cupboards, and well, the cleaning in that one room is pretty much constant, lol! 

I will, at some point this week, go through the larder to look at things that are past their expiry date, but for today I thought I'd focus on my craft room and office instead. 

I normally love this room, but recently it hasn't seen much love and attention. As a result there were a number of things that have been dumped in here, with the usual excuse of 'oh, I'll tidy that away later...'. 

There isn't actually a lot to show for today, because I focussed the majority of my attention on the cupboards under the eaves, and even tidied up they are not exactly a missed photo opportunity! That said, I have also made sure that some of the clutter that has accumulated over the past few months has a home or has been thrown out and I have tidied up some of the stacks of fabric on the shelves so I could fit more in. 

So here is the obligatory 'after' shot of the central seating area:

If you have been tidying or organising recently too and want to share I'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment and a link so I can visit - it's always more fun when you don't feel you are the only one! ;) 

Tidy Home Tuesday - Hallways...

The Flylady tells me that this week I should focus on my hallway and the dining room. Why these two rooms are handled in one go I can't tell, but I suspect that in a lot of households the dining room doesn't see that much action. A lot of families eat in the kitchen and keep the dining room for 'best', right? 

Well, we also eat in the kitchen most days, but because the dining room connects to the lounge with a set of permanently open double doors it's more an extension of the living room. In addition it tends to be the place where most craft projects take place (since it is a fairly large table), and it's lined with bookshelves and therefore functions as a sort of library too. That's a lot of functions for one room, and it does look a bit battered at times...

The hallway also looks a bit battered - most of the time. This is probably the highest traffic area of the house, and I tend to pick up discarded shoes, bags, jumpers and coats several times a day. 

For ages now I've been thinking of hanging some pictures on the wall to make it look a bit more homely, but the truth is, it's not all that wide, and therefore the walls get scuffed quite a bit. Having pictures there is probably not the best idea. 

As it is this isn't a particularly loved space. It's OK, but it is definitely a space to move through rather than to linger in. But then again, unless you have a grand entrance hall that invites you to linger, isn't that usually the case? 

The Flylady asked me to spend 15 minutes in this space today, just picking up and sorting things that are not in their rightful place or things that should be binned. 

I can do this, I thought, and promptly managed to get rid of a few old pairs of shoes that were somehow still in the shoe cabinet even though they had been outgrown. I also sorted through some of the paperwork that littered the shoe cabinet / console table and then placed a little jug of allotment flowers on top. 

There, that wasn't too bad, was it? ;) 

Tidy Home Tuesday - Mission Bedroom

Bedrooms are funny. Magazines and blogs alike tell you all about how your bedroom is your sanctuary, your little slice of heaven. 'Look around your bedroom', the Flylady says, 'and ask yourself if there is anything laying around that you would consider trash if it was in a hotel room Your bedroom should be your very favourite retreat! 

I don't so much disagree with  that statement (after all, wouldn't that be nice?!), as feel the need to apply a reality check, because the reality is much more complex that that. 

Dear Flylady, I am prepared to give it a go and I admit that decluttering is a good idea, but there is plenty in this room that would look out of place in a hotel room.

Just saying...

Yes, the bedroom is the room you retreat to. It's private, and it's the place that sees the most tranquility of perhaps all the rooms in a home. 

But it also is the room that is not usually seen by guests, which means that it easily becomes a room that needs to be good for all sorts of stuff that a family accumulates and that doesn't look too decorative in the living room! 

And even more important, if you have children, the function of a bedroom extends. It's not just a private sanctuary for you, or for you and your partner, it's also a family room, shared by all. It's the first room your children enter in the morning, when they run in to wake you up and claim their morning snuggle. It's the room they sneak into in the dead of night if they had a nightmare or are feeling unwell. It sees children growing up from tiny infants to toddlers, to pre-schoolers, to school children, and it needs to expand in function to accommodate all their needs. Furniture gets added (cots, changing stations, nappy bins...), and gets removed again as needs change, toys and books get dragged in for early morning or evening play and reading sessions, ill children snuggle under the covers and watch Netflix on the laptop, morning coffees and hot chocolates get carried in, get drunk in bed, get spilt in the bed. Walls see their fair share of abuse (boy #3 may just have 'tried' his colouring pens on the wall behind our bed a few weeks ago... grrrr!). Pillows go flying in pillow fights. Covers get pulled off so they can be used in the construction of dens, laundry gets sorted... This room is meaningful to the family in so many ways that extend that boutique hotel notion of 'sanctuary'.

It is a sanctuary, but the word may just have to stretch its meaning a little bit to make room for everybody...

(Flylady magic - 15 minutes in the weekly 'zone' really does get a lot done...)

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!