Woo hoo! I know it's absurd that I'm this excited about my house getting cleaner, but you've got to understand that my house has never been this consistently clean, and getting cleaner, since three years ago when I was a brand new mother and all I had to do all day was clean while my three-week-old baby slept. And even then it wasn't consistent, it was just frequent.
But things really seem to be changing in a permanent way right now! My living room is clean. And I mean really clean. Nothing is under or behind the couch. The bookshelves look great and actually have empty space on them. The coat closet opens and closes easily, and nothing falls out when I open it. It's amazing!
And what's even better is that because I'm taking it slowly and thoroughly, I'm not only cleaning the house, I'm actually taking care of things that I run across as I clean. I'm faxing in medical paperwork and putting things on Craigslist and getting rid of things that have just been sitting there gathering dust for years! I've found my glasses and some books I was looking for and my cell phone is actually charged and I know where it is! When I get ready to go somewhere, all I have to do is open the coat closet and grab my purse and the diaper bag off the top shelf and they're both there and easy to reach without having to plow through piles of out of season jackets. And it's been this way for almost ten days now!
So here's the graph for the first week of the living room. You can see that I hit my goal, and if you could see the next few days, you'd see that it's lasted beyond the chart.
Things in the living room got so great, in fact, that I decided I just couldn't wait until the end of the week to start in on the kitchen, so I made a chart for that and started tracking my progress in there as well. Already the progress is amazing! The counters are clean and absolutely free of clutter; the dishes are no longer heaped up in the dish drainer waiting to cascade down onto the floor at the slightest bump. Instead, not only are they all put away, the dish drainer itself is dried off and underneath the sink, leaving me a spot on the counter to cook and mix. It's wonderful! And again, I've started addressing the things that have been haunting me in there too. I finally moved four boxes of dishes that have been in the corner for almost a year, and I used two TV tables (which I was able to reach easily because I had already cleaned the coat closet) to create a space for the computer and move it off of the kitchen table. I'm telling you, this is awesome! I don't know why it didn't occur to me to track my progress sooner, but I'm doing it now and it's working wonderfully.
So ta ta for now! I've got the urge to go hit the laundry area and add another dot to this graph.
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