Welcome to the 5-Day Clean Your House for Christmas Challenge. Otherwise known as: Crystal really needs to deep clean her house and she needs the public accountability to get it done. Ahem. 🙂
{Thank you for humoring me. If your house is in great shape, please just skip over these posts. I may be the only one who has kind of let my housework and decluttering slide a bit the past few months.}
I feel like I need to apologize in advance for today’s assignment. Because we’re going there, oh yes we are…
Today’s assignment is to clean the kitchen.
{Cue the groans and people clicking away from this post as fast as possible in and effort to try to pretend you didn’t see that. :)}
Here’s my plan for this morning (feel free to follow it somewhat, if you find it helpful… or you can get a laugh out of how detailed I am!):
This Morning’s Plan
1. Read my Bible, exercise, and shower.
2. Get dressed to my shoes. (Thanks, Flylady!)
3. Eat some breakfast, read aloud to the kids, start a load of laundry.
4. Morning chores with the kids.
5. Get the kids started on their schoolwork. Kindergarten with Silas.
6. Switch the laundry.
7. Make apple pie.
8. Attack the Kitchen:
- Surface clean.
- Go through cupboards & pantry. Clean out/organize.
- Clean fridge & freezer.
9. Celebrate a job well done… maybe before 6:30 p.m. today?? 🙂
So, that’s my morning plan. I’m hopeful to have it all done before dinner time today — maybe even lunchtime if my morning goes perfect. Which never happens, but I can always dream that today might be the day! 🙂
I’ll take pictures and will post an update later today to let you know how it goes.
Want To Join Me?
Are you joining me? If so, what room(s) are you planning to tackle today and what’s your morning plan? Let us know in the comments. If you are blogging about it, I’ll have a link-up that you can link your post to in my post later today.
Cari M says
I would like to declutter like you did yesterday, but don’t know what to keep and what to toss. When you keep so little of clothing, does that mean you do laundry every other day? Where do you store off season clothing? And I guess with paperwork, you resolve everything quickly, otherwise you would have to keep more paperwork. Do you receive e-bills etc. instead of mail? Do you use kindle for books or do you just limit yourself to a few and whatever is available at the library? Thanks!
Crystal Paine says
We usually do a load of laundry every day. My kids have more outfits than me, though, so they can go longer than I can when it comes to laundry. 🙂
We have a tub where we store off-season clothing. I only keep a few things, though, since they are all growing quickly and usually are in a different size by the following year. I keep a few of Kathrynne’s things to pass down to Kaitlynn, but since they have such different tastes, we usually pass clothing on or donate it once they’ve outgrown something.
We try to practice the “touch it once” policy when it comes to paperwork — file, shred, or scan as soon as we open up stuff. We aren’t perfect at it, but we rarely have paper piles as a result.
And we have two bookshelves that we keep our books on. We used to have more, but we pared down with our last move. I typically pass on all but the very best of the best. And I actually often pass many of those on, too, because I would rather someone is reading and benefiting from a book than it’s just sitting on my shelf. The only ones I keep are our very favorite children’s books, some reference books, books we haven’t read yet, and our very, very favorite must-keep books. We have a great library system with fantastic kids’ books, so that helps a lot.
Cari M says
Thank you so much! Your detailed answer helps so much. I agree that except for the very best or most used, it’s better that someone is using the items than the items just sitting on my shelf/closet/home. Hopefully that thought , along with how great I think your closets look, will motivate me to declutter.
Heart and Haven says
Ok, I got this! 😉 Luckily my kitchen isn’t “too” bad. But in all honesty it takes work EVERY DAY to keep it clean & functioning. We are a family of 6, I’m a sahm, and my husband works from home – so that puts a lot of strain on using the kitchen all day long.
I just cleaned out the fridge last week, wiping down all the shelves. And our oven got an unscheduled cleaning this weekend! We were baking a 20 lb. turkey that didn’t fit in our roasting pan, so hubby put in on a rack over a cookie sheet. Well, the drippings ran over the side causing our smoke alarm to go off. We had a total FAIL for a fire drill, so we had a family meeting and discussed what we should have done, and repeated a fire drill (correctly) later that day. 🙂
Shelly says
I just cleaned my refrigerator crisper drawer out. It had been a long time since the last cleaning and I found a few, really yucky items in there. They were so bad I couldn’t even tell what they used to be.
I need to get the surface areas cleaned in the kitchen though. I’ll work on it as I make some more candy for Christmas today. 🙂
Jessica says
My day got off to a crummy start. I took my 4 year old and almost 2 year old to the store to get bread and bananas and pick up prescriptions. My kids went totally “bananas” in there and the whole adventure took TWO AND A HALF HOURS because I had to chase them all over the store. I had people telling me “you should have her buckled in”, etc, about my little one. Well, she learned how to unbuckle herself at 12 months old. She was walking at 9 months and running at 10 months. She has no fear. The pharmacy is only open during the hours my husband is at work, so I have no choice. After that, my patience wore out and I scolded my children for being so rude and disrespecting me.
After we had some lunch, I worked on the basement. I filled up three large trashbags of items to donate and one grocery bag of items to recycle and one grocery bag of items for the garbage. My basement needs a lot more work though!
Crystal Paine says
My second daughter sounds like your little one. She had zero fear and figured out how to do everything far sooner than I would have ever expected. I learned to walk into a room and look for the worst case scenario situation because she’d probably figure out how to do it! She’s finally mellowed out some, but her no fear, persistent, I-can-do-it-myself attitude is really starting to turn into a good thing. I’m so curious to see where she ends up in life!
Leah says
Ok, after watching you do this for two days, I am in – My bathroom and office baskets won’t know what hit them! 🙂 Thanks for the push – I am SO inspired by your ‘after’ photos.
Honestly, I don’t know how you do it – I am a single gal who works full time, and I am doing good to clean house on the weekends, let alone each day. :/
Lana says
i hope you do a clean the van day so that I have to get out there and do it!
Mallory Hall says
I second this! Yikes. Doritos embedded in the carpet and I’m pretty sure someone spilled an entire cup of milk somewhere….
Angie Young says
I’m sweeping all of the floors in the house today. Then hopefully get the living room dusted. I’m pleased to say that other than wiping down the counters and stove top that my kitchen is in pretty decent order.
Jessica says
I am still getting finished with the master bedroom from Monday… a few things got in the way the last couple of days, but I still intend to finish it today. On the plus side I actually did half of that list for the kitchen yesterday 🙂 and will do the rest today, as well as a baking session with my kids, which will lead to me having to clean in again.