Let's Clean Together

Which means I have the day off. It’s rainy and yucky outside (Thanks, Ida), which means I’m stuck indoors. My to-do list (which I’m not going to entirely limit to cleaning) is:

• closet
• bed
• bookshelf

• bags/packs from floor
• top of dresser
• boxes from floor
• rest of floor
• my section of the fridge

• vacuum
• clean kitchen
• do laundry
• exercise
• French lesson 2
• French lesson 3
• finish chapter in Sahara
• DO NOT WATCH TV. (failed, watched V)

Bonus: Organize papers.

It’s GORGEOUS! And while I have a mountain bike ride planned for later, right now I have my windows wide open and my blinds up – which just begs for a clean room. I’ve already put around 10 minutes into cleaning, and I’m going to set a stopwatch… see how long I go.

Goals:

Bed clean
Paper all in one spot
Top of dresser clean
Top of bookshelf clean
Innards of bookshelf clean
Closet floor clean
Closet shelf clean
Main floor clean
Bathroom clean

Goals are not necessarily in that order.

UPDATE! 1 hour and 35 minutes of cleaning later, my list looks like this:

Bed clean (yes, it started done, but stuff is put on my made bed while I’m sorting things. Still easier to clean than when I started today)
Paper all in one spot.
Top of dresser clean
Top of bookshelf clean.
Innards of bookshelf clean.
Closet floor clean.
Closet shelf clean.
Main floor clean
Bathroom clean

I feel I’m making very positive progress. But it’s break time. I shall conquer this today!

And I feel SO good about it. Even though the rest of my room is going to hell in a handbasket. I think my next step may be to organize my closet – if it were organized I might be able to put things away, which may in turn help me to keep my bed clean! Work in progress.

I went to gather stuff together to open a bank account this morning, because I don’t have a bank in NC and I’ve been sitting on checks. When I went to grab them to finally open the bank account, THEY WEREN’T THERE. Which means I did something STUPID with them. Which means I am in full on clean mode until I find my stash of over $1500 in checks. How in the ache ee double hockey sticks did I let my room/car get this bad?? It’s on.

So the house I’m living in has mostly tile and wood floors. Great, right? It’s supposed to be cleaner and healthier and prettier and all that. However, I cannot get them clean enough! I have a dog and my roommates have a dog, and between those two dogs and normal dust accumulation the floors are always dirty. This is gross because I walk around barefoot, and before bringing my feet up to my bed I literally have to wipe them off every time. Ew.

Vacuuming with the hose gets rid of the main furballs that seem to accumulate and start floating around the house, but there’s still a lot of grime on the floor. I’ve used wet rags to wipe the dirt from the floor (standing on two and shuffling around seems to work well). This gives me floors I deem clean enough for about 15 minutes, and it’s very time consuming if I want to do the whole house.

Anyone have any advice for cleaner floors? I realize slippers may be my best option, but I like my bare feet!

I recently moved from CO to NC, and I still haven’t finished unpacking. I’m renting a room in a house, and there’s an unpleasant smell I absolutely cannot put my finger on in the room – but I would need to clean up everything I’ve already put down to find it! I’m afraid it’s some sort of mildew in the back of the closet.

My cleaning goals are a little complicated by the fact that I travel a lot for work – I’m often gone all week, busy all weekend, and then gone again… and there’s too much to do in the cleaning realm, so I barely do anything!

I liked the ideas in the previous entries about keeping an area clean for 7 days, then trying a new area while keeping the old one clean. I think I may modify that a little. I am rarely home for 7 days at a time, so I might try to keep an area clean for 7 ‘at-home days’ at a time before moving on.

I have a hike with some friends planned for this morning, but when I get back it’s cleaning time. I want to clean for at least three hours today and three hours tomorrow to really get my stuff put away and start at a relatively clean spot – I’ll be gone for another five days after tomorrow, so I’d like to come back to a room which isn’t a complete disaster area.

After my initial clean, my first area to try to keep clean is my bed. The bed that was already in this room when I moved in is humongous, so it ends up getting used like a table. My goal is to keep my bed free of clutter and make my bed every morning when I get up.