That "Clean For Company" Feeling

Have you noticed that you look at your house totally differently when you know company is coming over?  All of a sudden you start noticing little pockets of clutter and little bits of dirt and dust that you hadn't noticed before.  This gives you a great burst of energy and motivation to clean up what had seemed perfectly fine 5 minutes ago. 

It is a natural bit of pride to want your home to look nice and tidy for upcoming company.  We all want guests to "ooo" and "ahh" and tell us how nice our home looks.  There's nothing wrong with this and in fact, I will use it to my advantage sometimes.  If I'm having a difficult time maintaining my routines and keeping my house clean, I'll use any excuse to invite some friends over.  First of all, I love to have company and it gives me a chance to entertain, which I love, but also it forces me to get busy and tidy up. 

However, you have to think about what message you're sending to yourself and your children.  You are telling them that it's more important to present a good face to others than to make the house nice for your own family.  That would be brought home to me when I would start my regular Saturday morning cleaning and the kids would ask me who was coming over.  I hated the fact that they associated cleaning with company and not with us doing something nice for our own family. 

So why not treat your family as company?  Why not bring out the special tablecloths and dishes once in a while and make as nice a meal as you would for guests?  Why not make an appointment with yourself to take a quick tour every few days and look around your house with "company eyes" and notice the areas that need a little extra attention.  Your family will love it and start feeling extra special themselves and you'll likely catch them making their own efforts to pick up after themselves. 

Emptying the "Empty Nest"

I don't know how many of you have grown kids as I do, but once your kids are actually out of the house, it's surprising how much "stuff" they think they are entitled to leave behind. It's stuff that they don't really need and don't actually plan to use, but Lord help you if you try to get rid of it.

Do you really want to be storing that stuff clear into your retirement? It's really just clutter, taking up space that you could use for more useful items.

If you really want to get rid of it, you need to have a plan. If your kids are flaky like mine, just asking them to come and get it isn't really going to work. Going through boxes of old junk, even their own, isn't going to be their idea of fun and it's not going to be high on their list of priorities.

One thing to do is to set a firm date. Give them a good month or so to get around to it, but then let them know that after that date, the free storage deal is going to be over. Then give them a head start on the project. Go through the stuff and start sorting it into some general piles - clothes, books, papers, school projects, etc.

Get out your digital pictures and document as you go. You can easily post the pictures to a Flickr account and share it with your child. That way, they can see exactly what they are dealing with and that is likely to give them a little motivation to save some of the things that are more important to them. If nothing else, you can have them tag the pictures of the things they want and the things you can get rid of.

Then just box it up and leave it for them to come and get it. And enjoy your now uncluttered space. Just try not to fill it up with all of your old, unneeded junk.

Easy Daily Clutter Tip

Sometimes I think one of the biggest challenges in keeping a nice house is to deal with the daily clutter of dishes, mail, shoes, newspapers, backpacks, etc. If you can just get this one habit until control, you would be so surprised at what a difference it would make in your home!

One simple thing you can do is to just get in the habit of taking a few things with you every time you leave a room. It would literally take a matter of seconds to pick up a couple of glasses or dishes when you're heading for the kitchen, a pair of shoes or a coat when you're headed for the bedroom - how easy is that?

Eliminating the clutter in this way will make your room look so much cleaner and will make it so much easier to keep a room looking nice. You've gotten to the point where you don't even notice the clutter. Once you remove the constant clutter from a room, you'll notice even one thing out of place. It's like the peace and quiet of the country after a few weeks of being in the noise and bustle of the city. It's really refreshing.

The trick is to remember is. You know the old saying that it takes 28 days to build a habit. I don't know if that's true or not, but building new habits is definitely a big challenge for me. However, there are some little tricks you can use to help get yourself into a new habit. Here are some ideas:

- Put a rubber band around your wrist or a brightly colored bracelet.
- Reward yourself. If you do better with the habit than you did the day before, reward yourself with a little extra TV time or a special coffee or some other small, easily repeatable reward.
- Stick up post-it notes everywhere to encourage yourself.
- Engage your kids or your husband. Have them levy .25 cent fines on you when you forget.
- Try the don't "break the chain" technique. Get a calendar and some fun stickers. You get a sticker for each day you remember your habit. When you get a chain of 3 or 4 days, plan a special treat for yourself and then you won't want to break the chain.

New Basement Reveal

Well, after that last scary post, I feel like I need to demonstrate that I don't actually live in a cave! In fact, most of the time, my house is pretty nice. And believe me, the embarrassment of being caught with a messy house is a big motivator to get back with the program on your daily routines!

Anyway, here are some pictures of my new and improved basement that my husband painted up all nice for me!

Being in the blog world is hard to explain to non-bloggers. But sometimes you can really get some great ideas from other people's blogs. For instance, right after the first of the year, I was poking around over at Life With my 3 Boybarians (love that name!). She had just redone her schoolroom and I liked the color scheme so much, I sent my husband straight to Home Depot to get some paint and get right on that basement. Click HERE to go take a peek at her schoolroom. Naturally, he thought I was crazy, but if he doesn't know that by now... And anyway, it was a holiday weekend and he was bored, so he went, and a few weeks later, it looks like this:

Doesn't that look wonderful? I especially like the high gloss white on the bookshelves and fireplace. It looks SO much better. In the right light, you can even see the reflection of the books in the paint. I also took the opportunity to reorganize my bookshelves and shift some of the furniture around.



I think my husband did a great job too. He apprenticed with a professional painter for about six months and he really does very meticulous work on all the trim and everything. Although, I do have to give props to the guy at Home Depot for helping us pick out the paint. Below was my original paint color. I thought a rich chocolate color would be just great, but when we got it on the wall, it looked exactly like someone had smeared a Hershey's bar all over the wall. So I was glad that we switched to a much lighter shade and Tim, the paint guy showed us how we could take the same can of paint and just lighten it a few shades for the contrasting trim.




Here is what the basement looked like when we first bought the house two years ago. It looked like they had taken a 5 gallon bucket of some kind of cheap, nasty off white color that looked sort of like a dingy tooth color and put it on every wall in the house. I'm serious! The entire house - every single surface in it, was this nasty dingy, yellow-y color. It was the only thing I didn't like about the house, well besides the ugly carpets, because I just love color in a house. My Mom always painted everything either white or off white, but I've got to have color around me. So we painted several rooms before we moved in, and several more since then, but we've just gradually been eliminating that yucky color a room at a time.


The basement was a challenge though because the walls are all textured. You know, like they texture ceilings, well they did that all the way down the walls, all the way through the whole basement. I wasn't sure how well that would look with a color, but I was pleasantly surprised. I think it looks great with the color. It feels much warmer and much more "finished" than it did, less like a basement. What do you think?

Caught with my pants down!

Well, it finally happened, the ultimate embarassment. My super-duper cleanie sister happened to drop in on a day when my house was looking like a total train wreck! Ugh. Don't you just hate it when that happens? It is SO humiliating! You just want to crawl right under the couch and eat dust bunnies.

I know you're thinking that I am the last person who should let myself be placed in a situation like that. After all, I teach this stuff and I write posts all the time about cleaning and organization. But, we all have busy weeks, and get distracted with other stuff and start drifting out of our normal routines. And even though I've learned a lot about organizing and developed a lot of new habits, it doesn't mean that I don't have a little backslide once in a while.

And my sister, of all people - sheesh! These are pictures of my sister's house. As you can see it is gorgeous and it looks like this 24 X 7. I always go into hyperdrive when I know she is coming over because I can't stand the thought of her seeing my house in less than perfect condition. And believe me, today it was in much less than perfect condition! We had just redecorated the kitchen last night and were too tired to finish it up, so there were boxes and plastic wrap and styrofoam all over, and so were the pictures we had taken down. We'd run out of kitty litter and the cat box was in a very sorry state, and naturally her grandkids were begging to come in and visit the kitties. Even my normally clean entryway was all cluttered with my Easter decorations that I was in the process of putting up. And of course, my husband had to bring her into the very messy kitchen to show off our new dining room chairs and new decor, and then take her down to the cluttered basement to show her the new paint job. Man, I so need to retrain that guy!



Oh well, what can you do? It is what it is. You can't get a do-over on that one. And stumbling around mumbling excuses and trying to shove stuff out of the way just makes it worse. You just have to stand up and deal with the situation as best you can.

After she left, I was tempted to get mad and blame my family, but it's not their fault. Yes, some of the mess was their fault, but I'm the Mom and I'm the one who sets the tone for keeping the house clean (or not!). So, I didn't get mad, but I did get busy and so did the rest of the family. And you know, with all four of us working, we had the house back under control in just about 30 minutes. Hopefully, next time we'll think to do the 30 minute clean-up BEFORE my sister comes over rather than after!

Closet Organizing 101

My friend Pooba did a post about her closet organization. She's mainly talking about Wally world and all the fabulous containers they sell, but I think she did a great job of using them to redo her closets. Pop over to take a peek - Pooba's Closet.

PS: Wanna hear something weird? I found Pooba when she entered my SITS Spring Fling contest and won my prize. Turns out she lives right in my neighborhood and I think she's the first blog commenter I've ever met in person. What are the odds?

Dealing with Financial Clutter

This is a subject I am kind of a fanatic on. Money is very important to me. Not because I want a new Lexus, or a mink coat, or a cruise around the world, but because I want to make sure that my family is safe and secure, even in precarious financial times such as these.

I've had some tough financial times in my life and it wasn't fun at all. And it isn't all about having nice clothes, or eating in nice restaurants, or taking nice vacations. It's about having a safe place to live.

Because of my Mom's financial situation as a single mother, I was raised in some very rough neighborhoods. The kind where your Mom doesn't let you play in the back yard or go across the street by yourself to play with a friend. The kind where there are shootings and police around all the time and scary looking guys walking around. Where the kids at school have lice and belong to gangs and will be only too happy to beat you up if you look at them wrong. My Jr. High School backed right up against the Long Beach Projects, so when we moved to Orange County a year or so later, I thought I'd died and gone to paradise.

Here's a great post I found on Unclutterer.com the subject of Financial Clutter - click HERE to go and check it out.