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