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? 

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! 

All the To-Dos...

Just look at that pile of bedding...

It's been a bit hectic in our house these past few days. A lot of tidying, cleaning, sorting going is going on.

The reason? Well, it's the start of term soon, and that's always the time in our house to get organised, to start thinking about how to optimise things around here to keep the (not so) well oiled machine of our chaotic household ticking over when my work timetable is less flexible than it is over the summer. Oh, I work a lot over the summer, but it's my work, my writing. With term starting it becomes less about that and more about following a set teaching timetable. It's not bad per se, in fact in some ways it's helpful, but it does mean that we have to become a bit more organised as a family because there is just less slack in the system.

The main reason for the increase of activity these past few days is boy #3's impending Christening. We've been meaning to do this for ages and had, in fact, fixed on a date a few times, but there were always good reasons to postpone - illness, a recent loss in the family, another big family do, ... - and before we knew it boy #3 was 2 1/2 years old. After coming back from our holiday this summer we decided to just get. it. done. We told the families and a few friends, and we let everyone know that while we'd love it if they could join us, we were aware that it was short notice and we were not planning a big do, so nobody would be upset or sulking if for one reason or another things didn't work out and people couldn't make it. 

Well, it turns out that most people actually could make it, meaning that the house will be rather full for the next week or so. I've been tidying and cleaning, and getting out extra bedding, and I'm wondering what we might cook to feed them all. I'm looking forward to it all, though, even while I'm also trying to snatch a few minutes here and there of quiet time - a stroll through the garden, a little chat with the chicken ladies, a cup of tea while gazing at my sewing and knitting utensils in the craft room, which is shortly to be handed over to our guests.