Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Six days Later and.....

Nothing to show for my organization challenge. I have done nothing. Not one little bit. I am still feeling ill and I have had absolutely no energy or physical ability to get to work in my area. In fact the rest of the house is a disaster. So here is my plan and hopefully I will be feeling good enough to accomplish it.
  1. Get the rest of the house in order again. I have to do this. This is how I work. If the rest of my house is decent then I can focus on this room and I won't feel guilty.
  2. I will not be clearing out this room entirely. One reason is that I don't want to move the desk, just to put it back again and also I just cannot afford to have the STUFF clog up the rest of my house. I have some room to move in here and I think that it will work out fine.
  3. Okay, this is where I get lost. I don't know where to start. I know that a lot of my mess is papers lots and lots of papers, and this will take up most of my time, but how shall I do it. I need suggestions. Shall I tackle it first? Should I clean out the rest first? And can I finally get everything into files? I don't know what to do.
  4. I will need to get rid of all the boxes and find places for the items.
  5. Hopefully I will finally buy a filing cabinet and some other storage solutions for the closet. I want to pack this full, but in an orderly way.
  6. Who can help me? Well, I will need the help of my husband. He will need to watch the kids and act like I have gone shopping. I will need either and hour a day, or sessions of three hours. I will also need his big strong muscles to move things for me. And I am sure that I will run into some things that I will need his advice on. It would be nice also if I was able to hire a babysitter a couple of times. I would love to find an Ethel, you know a partner in crime, so if I have any takers I would love to come to your house next.
Anyway this is my rough plan. I hope this illness of mine has not gotten in the way of my goal. Will 24 days be enough?

6 comments:

The Proverbs Wife said...

When my children were as young as yours I wasn't able to keep the house as organized as I would have liked. And often beat myself up for it or took out my frustrations by fussing at the children for making messes.

What I eventually did was focus only on the front room, the kitchen and the guest bathroom. These were the rooms that would be seen if guest came over. All of the other rooms I gave the children free reign.

During my children early years I focused on teaching to clean their rooms and finally as they grew older they began helping me to tidy and clean up the common areas.

So my point is that with young children getting into a cleaning routine will take baby steps.

Dawn said...

Maybe try to start out slow, like just spending 15 minutes at a time doing something in the room. Sort things into piles such as: to be filed, to be thrown away, to be given away, etc. I hope this helps, and good luck.

Jackie B. said...

good luck. I am trying to be much more organized and such as well. I know you can do it. You need to take baby steps in getting things done. Like Dawn said "start slow".

Anonymous said...

when it comes to papers, it's important to not feel overwhelmed. I think it would be easier to sort into two piles first. One for tossing, one for keeping. From your keeping pile- sort again into different piles keeping the like with the like. You will have a good idea of what you have and then you organize them into file folders, or what ever you choose!

Good luck!

Hope you feel better soon!

Unknown said...

i am the same way you are, everything has to be in order for me to do a project. i think just taking your time is a great way to get them done

goeckers said...

Hang in there! At some point, when my kiddo's were younger I realized that I wanted happy kids more than a perfect house. I realized that I had to give on some things. I did find that a great way to teach kids to clean is by making it fun. If you want all of the finger prints off your walls, make your kids "CSI detectives" and hand them a cleaning wipe. They will scour the house finding and wiping off the finger prints, and have fun while doing it. I think that "Grumpy Gus" is coming into a great age where he can share some of the responsibility. Good Luck! I hope that you feel better.