The good, the bad, and the ugly

Well, let's start with the ugly:

Yes, there is shredded paper on the floor from the dogs, and yes I chose to blog about it rather than clean it up.

And these are the highlights I chose to share, but the entire house is a mess.

Now the good: We love each other and our two amazing kids, and we are lucky to have a home filled with many things that we love and that give us joy.

And now, the bad: The "get rid of half our stuff and blog about it" idea did not solve our messiness problem by creating a home so easy to maintain it requires almost no effort.  So we're re-evaluating ourselves and our lives once again, and here's what we've learned so far:


1.  We are what a magazine article referred to as "passionate starters" but "lackluster finishers"; in other words, this blog kinda represents us in that we tend to start things passionately, and we aren't afraid to try new things, extreme things, pretty much any kinda thing, we'll try it, but we'll be damned if we'll see it through to the end!

2.  While we did not finish the blog project as we had intended, we did do some great things, got rid of a bunch of stuff, and organized our home so that everything has a place, which makes us feel great and has removed the overwhelming feeling of not knowing where to put things when it is time to clean up.

3. We don't like cleaning and are annoyed at the fact that it needs to be done on a regular basis.

4.  Therefore, we avoid it until the house becomes so messy it bothers us, which takes a considerable amount of time, and then by the time we are bothered enough to want to clean up, it is more difficult because there is so much to do.

5.  At this point we are not sure if we need to get rid of more stuff (because, as stated earlier, everything now has a place, it just needs to be put back in it), or if we just need to adhere to strict daily cleaning routines that prevent our house from ever getting so messy that it cannot be cleaned up in less than several hours. 

6. Obviously, the less stuff we have, the easier it is to clean, so we probably still have too much stuff, and we certainly still have more stuff than we need; however, pretty much everything in our home is used regularly or gives us or our children joy.


So, we're going to try to adhere to a cleaning routine of 20 minutes a day, plus at least 1 hour each weekend day, and see if that solves it, and if that doesn't work we'll try getting rid of more stuff and see if we can achieve a perfect balance of just enough stuff to make us happy and still be easy enough for us to maintain :)

Update

Where to even begin here... well, let's start with the good:

- On June 5th, Lauren and I participated in the Sunburst 10K. I say participated, because we only ran about 6K of it - but we traversed a distance of 10K in total. And while we very quickly learned that not training for the 2-3 months before a 10K is a bad thing (who knew?), and our bodies paid for that for a week or so, it's given us a new dedication towards making this something we do. We've started a 2-3 times a week training program, with the goal of running in a few 5K's, a 6K, and eventually running an entire 10K either at next year's Sunburst or before then if we find one we want to do and are ready for it. We've got three races in particular we are planning on signing up for in August, October and December - so we're hoping that our new-found dedication will keep us on track to run these and run each one a little bit better than the previous one.

- We're happy with our house. It turns out, what we thought would take at least six months to make us even begin to see happiness only took about three. Sure, we still need to deal with our laundry room, and we would like to paint the kitchen cabinets, and put up a few hooks in the garage to create a little more room in there. But, we aren't sitting around in our house constantly feeling like we are surrounded by things that make us unhappy and feel uncomfortable at home. We don't feel like we have out of control clutter, and we even have space in which we could store things now if we chose to do such. It's been an amazing transformation - one which will assuredly continue - but we are so much closer to our goal than where we started at this point, it feels amazing.

- I've started teaching again. I got offered a math class at Ivy Tech, and started last week. I love that feeling of helping someone understand something that they previously just could not wrap their head around. It's nice to find a different kind of fulfillment in work.

And now, the bad:

- This class, though a great opportunity and something we decided together was the right thing to do, is making our schedules Mon-Thurs. even more hectic, such that simply keeping up with the dishes and laundry and maintenance cleaning is taking up most of the time we are able to edge out in between dinner and running or walking each evening and also trying to have a little time at the end of the night to just sit and relax....which means we are struggling to complete little blogworthy projects on a regular basis. So, it may be a while (say, 7 more weeks), until our next legit project blog....unless we surprise ourselves and manage a little project here or there before this class is over :)

Hey... There's a desk under there (parts 2 & 3)

Things are just getting crazy - first we find a desk under our paper stacks at home, now I find two desks in my office this afternoon. Here I thought lo these many years that I had simply been setting my monitor, mouse and keyboard on stacks of notes, design ideas, and unfinished projects from years of having to stop working on one thing to start and finish the next "super important new #1 priority" (that would then be replaced by the next project of the same status by the next grant or managerial whim). But, as it turns out, under all this stuff:

Were these desks:

If only I had known about these desks! Think of all the elbow room I could have been enjoying. Think of all the times I could have set things temporarily on my desk instead of setting them on the floor and having to tenuously step over them for a day or two. Think of all the paper, books, and wires I could have stacked all over each other... oh, wait - that's what got me into this mess in the beginning. But now, with these desks clear (and even more so when I clean off the other desk and file cabinet in my office), I plan on turning over a new leaf. I am determined to find new ways to be more efficient and organized to be more efficient at work. Any ideas, anyone? Got an item on your desk that you just can't live/work without? As you may have noticed, a knowledge of organizational tools is something I don't possess - so I'm open to any and all help out there. Cause I gotta say, it feels a whole lot less claustrophobic and a whole lot more comfortable in my office - and I'd kinda like to keep it that way.

Garage Days Re-Revisited

Over Easter weekend I told myself I was gonna clean out the entire garage. As it was, I did a lot of work, but really only got about half the garage cleaned out. And, there still remained roughly 627,000 pounds of sawdust on the floor of the garage. Now, "luckily", we've tracked a few thousand pounds of sawdust into the house via our shoes in the past month and a half - but work still needed to be done. Along with the sawdust, here was the primary spot to be addressed in this cleanup:

I can't even begin to describe what is here... but I'm gonna do it anyway. There was an old comforter, groceries (like ziploc bags and napkins) that were purchased months ago and never made it in the house, paint cans from colors of paint we painted over (good thing we saved them, in case we wanted to put colors we hate back up on our walls again), and lots of trash. So, along with the sawdust, we threw out a lot:

OK, so maybe not that much trash. But I did fill up two trash cans. And now, the garage looks like this:

After all those days feeling Helpless, taking The Small Hours to get some cleaning done made The Wait well worth it (I probably owe Metallica $1 million in royalties just for typing this sentence). We finally have a clean garage. All that we need to do now is re-do our laundry room so the cabinets that are currently living in our garage can go up in the laundry room, put up the racks on the walls so we can store our bikes there - and then, for the first time in months, we will be able to put two cars in the garage. I can't wait - because my car is the one that was living in the driveway through the second half of the winter and a rainy April.

it's mario time!

Since Brett's been doing the posting recently and quite frankly, I think they've been lacking in substance, so I thought I'd do a real post today, about some extraordinarily difficult work that we spent hours struggling to accomplish, but in the end the sense of satisfaction made it all worth it.

Do you know how difficult it is to stay together without killing each other on moving levels with heat-seeking bullets flying all around you?  If you don't I suggest you find out and see what you are really made of!

Ok, so we didn't really accomplish anything in the house today, but look at how happy this made us:

And, if I may say so myself, we've been doing so many more things around the house ever since we started this blog that it is getting difficult to come up with things that are blog-worthy, but don't worry, we'll think of something :)

Until then, we still need to get all the star coins and beat level 9, so watch out Super Mario Bros Wii!

"Switching" things up

The "light" certainly came on with this project. We've really "flipped" things around now. The results are definitely "electrifying". I... oh, hold on, I think the bad pun police are here to arrest me...

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, we can move on. From the first time we even looked at this house, I knew I hated these light switches:

I'm not sure who decides to put switches in like this. I can only assume that the people that lived here previously had giant-sized hands that made using a normal light switch impossible. But, because they were functional, we kept them as-is despite my strong hate for them. But as we started repainting the house last week, we replaced some of them. And I realized something as a few more got replaced - it started to make this house seem more like I was living in "my home", rather than having taken over ownership of another person's house. So, today I decided to change the rest - and all without turning the power off (I only shocked myself throughout this whole process twice... but I don't seem to have any lasting effects, though. I only shocked myself throughout this whole process twice... but I don't seem to have any lasting effects, though. I only shocked myself throughout this whole process twice... but I don't seem to have any lasting effects, though). Why does someone do this without turning the power on? Because they are not smart. Regardless, we finally have gotten rid of all the switches that I've hated, with normal looking ones like this:

And, even though it was just something small, I feel even more comfortable in my own home. Combine that with the fact that we've, over the years, replaced most of the carpet with newer carpet or wood flooring, finally painted (almost) every room, completely redone both full bathrooms, and replaced the kitchen counters - and this more and more feels like I'm living in my own house. Now we just need to take care of this room at some point:

And boy do we have plans for this room. For starters, the cabinets we purchased for our failed breakfast bar will be replacing these hideously ugly cabinets. And we'll be finally peeling down this wallpaper (easily only the third ugliest wallpaper that was in this house when we moved into it) and painting it the color of our living room. We'll probably be replacing the yellow sink and toilet in the adjoining half bathroom as well:

But while the cabinets and painting will probably happen soon, the replacement of these two items will have to wait a while, most likely. But man, can I not wait to get rid of those things - next to the pink toilet we once had in our house, this is easily the ugliest toilet I've ever seen. As I type all this, it gets me thinking - who buys a house with a pink toilet, a yellow toilet, a kitchen with ugly counters, and hideous wallpaper in half the rooms? Us, I guess :)

Taking it outside the home

Yesterday I had Ginny and Sorin at my office for a few hours - and it became painfully obvious just how messy my office was. Now, to be clear, it has always been very, very obvious - but it wasn't painfully obvious until yesterday. Luckily, no one got hurt - but there were definitely some close calls as Sorin (who has only been walking for a few weeks) was attempting to navigate around the room. So, I decided it was time to take what I had been learning throughout this process at home and bringing it to the office. Here's some of the dangerous territory as it stood this morning:

It's amazing how I manage to function in this office, but somehow I do. But as I was going through the stacks of papers, boxes, and other items in these photos, I could only imagine what the subconscious conversations were that went on in my head that made this occur. Here's a few examples of what I can only assume they were:

"Wow, I've got a few zip drives in here. Now, I haven't seen anyone use a zip drive in 5-6 years, so I can probably send all these to surplus to let them decide if they are trash or can be recycled or re-purposed. But, I guess I should hold on to one, just in case someone comes in with a zip disk that has a file they now realize they desperately need from 7 years ago. But, if the drive I keep fails, then that's no good... so I better keep all 12".

"Hey, here's that specialized USB cable I was looking for last week - turns out it was in this box from when I moved offices a year and a half ago. I definitely need to put this somewhere where I'll remember it. Ooh, I know, I'll put it back in the box, with the other 27 cables just like it that also lived in this box without being needed for a year and a half. But... what if I forget these are in here? Problem solved - I'll just order 52 more of them, so I'm sure to have one on hand. But where to keep those when they arrive... I know, in this box!"

"Hmm... I literally have no idea what this is. I better hold onto it in case someone else needs it some day."

If these conversations didn't happen, then I really don't know what to tell myself or anyone about how my office got that bad (What's that you say? Maybe the problem is that I've been lazy and have just stacked stuff up for years on end rather than going through it? Bollocks, I say, bollocks. And that's a word they use in England, so it most definitely has to trump anything you could now say in response.). But this doesn't even tell the whole story of how bad my office was - you see the red/yellow/orange box at the bottom-center of the second picture above? That's not even my clutter. Apparently word has gotten out that clutter is allowed in my office, and clutter has been migrating to join it's kin. I had never even seen the contents of that box before, but it's apparently been living in my office for over a year now; and that's assuming I didn't move that box of "not my stuff" from my old office... or even from my office before that.

But enough living in the past. Here's what my office looks like now:

So much better. I feel confident that my children can walk around my office without risking life and limb simply by being anywhere near the floor. And my office is now completely clean.

Well, accept this part:

...and this part...

...er... and this part...

...and, um... this part...

So, yeah, it's a work in progress