The second time that I was panicked again was just this past Friday. My friends and I were doing one of those wine, paint, canvas nights. The girl I was driving with was going to pick me up and I was like "Oh no. What if she comes to the door or comes inside. Once again- this house looks like a disaster. Messy kitchen, living room, dining room, and is my bathroom downstairs even acceptable for someone to use? I'm running around like a crazy person and yelling at my husband who has been working on a paper all day. We are arguing and I feel like such a bad person 1. Because I had spent the majority of the day in bed on the computer. 2. I didn't get anything done that day cleaning wise. I'm transferring my blame to my husband because I know that I was in the wrong. We end up getting everything straightened up and no one ends up coming inside the house but that wasn't even the point. The point is that situation never should have even happened to begin with. I told my husband that I can't keep living like this. I can't handle the stress of working full time, figuring out dinner, making dinner, and then being to exhausted to pick up a single thing or do laundry during the week, and then saving all of the cleaning/ laundry for the weekends. Something needs to change. I had a nice night out and maybe if you are lucky I'll show you my embarrassing painting that I did. Eh...who am I kidding? I'm a glutton for pain-I'll show y'all at the end of the post.
On Sunday I got up around 10, got dressed, put on shoes and knew that I wanted to start organizing our second bedroom which is really just (office/storage/ place where I sort out all of our laundry. The room was a complete and I mean complete disaster! I was scared that things would fall on me when I approached my closet. I set a timer on my phone (reminded myself that I can do anything for 15 minutes- another flylady thing :) ) put on some tunes, and got to work. I was surprised how quickly I was able to go through and organize it and get rid of a lot of clutter. Once my 15 minutes were up I took a 15 minute break and drank some water., and then got back to work. In less than an hour my closet was organized and it had plenty of room for more storage. I looked around the room and felt completely overwhelmed for a moment. It looked like there was sooo much more that needed to be done. However, I took a deep breath and figured out a plan. The first thing I did was scoop up all of the clothes that were on the floor (sorted or not) and brought them into the hallway. Wow. Talk about a mountain of clothes. Actually, make that two mountains. I didn't allow myself to get distracted and start a load of laundry. I went back to my original mission. So like I was saying even with the clothes gone out of the room I was still feeling so overwhelmed, but I didn't let that stop me. Once again, I remembered some pieces of advice from the flylady book- 1. One item at a time- put away, throw away, or give away. 2. Start in one corner of the room and work your way around. Don't go from one side to the next picking and choosing each thing to organize/ clean. Work your way around in a circle. 3. Once again, only 15 minutes at a time and then a break. So I did. I worked diligently and when the timer would go off I would stop, enjoy some videos on youtube, and once that the break timer went off I went back to work. Before I would restart though I would first look at the closet that was nice and clean, and then I looked at the spots that had already been cleared away and looked sooo much better. I continued to do this for almost the rest of the day. I never got panicked or overwhelmed because I was very diligent with my 15 on/15 off schedule. By 4pm I proudly brought my husband upstairs and showed him everything that I had accomplished. He was SUPER impressed. :) And you know what...I was proud of myself for getting something done and done right.
I kept coming into the room over and over again just to look at how clean it looked and it made me feel so great. I even brought the book that I was reading into the room and sat at the desk and read. I felt so calm and so incredibly peaceful. It made me think wow- if I can have this huge affect on me in this one room- imagine how I would feel if my entire house looked like this. I didn't do any more that night but I had gotten rid of almost 4 bags of clutter/garbage in that room and I felt like a weight had been lifted.
Yesterday my husband got sick (bad stomach bug) and spent the afternoon and evening in bed. I went to the store after work, came home to check up on him and then went right back out to fill my car up with gas due to the impending weather. When I got home I made him dinner (chicken soup of course) and then went downstairs. I made my own dinner and caught up on some DVRed episodes of Real Housewives-don't judge. Ok...you can judge- my husband certainly does. :p It was 10pm by the time I was done and I looked at my kitchen it would be soooo easy to leave the dishes in the sink and on the counters, and call it a night. But then I told myself that it was that kind of thinking that got me into the situations that I was unfortunately so used to. I told myself 15 minutes-just 15 minutes and I will stop. It is so true that people procrastinate and put things off because they think doing a task will take so much longer than it actually does. I looked at the dishwasher and thought putting away the dishes will probably take 15 minutes alone. You know what-it didn't it took 6 minutes. I had time to unload, reload, put away the spices that I had used for dinner, clean up the counters, and shine my sink. 15 minutes. This morning I got ready in ten minutes again- as usual. I was rush, rush, rushing but I at least had time to make my cup of coffee, and I looked into my clean and shiny sink and laughed because there was just a single, solitary spoon sitting in it. I looked over at the coffee table and saw plates and cups on it from my husband's breakfast but it just actually made me smile instead of putting me into a rage when I usually clean and then it gets messed up. I was actually HAPPY that the coffee table was messy and a spoon was in the sink because that my meant my husband must have been feeling better and was able to eat breakfast. It honest to God made me smile.
I need to remember things like this. I need to remember my 15 minutes can achieve results and most importantly I need to start working on those two mountains of laundry- it's like the blob- it's going to eat the entire hallway soon. Wish me luck tonight so that I keep working and don't get discouraged and realize that I am seeing results! Also, I'm reminding myself to read this if I feel tired and don't want to clean tonight. I need to remind myself how good cleaning makes me feel about myself. :) As promised...here is my painting. :)
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