Organise my home and my life, and log it here

I have an hour and a half, I am pretty organized I think! I’ve not panicked, but I did find it hard to sleep last night.
I actually still have to finish packing my toiletries/toothbrushes etc, and to clean out the rabbit hutch or at least his toilet. He is going to have the run of the garden and be fed once a day.

So apologies in advance for not returning any cheers for the coming week!

trying to Crisis Clean the house, before my parents come and feed the pets while we go on holiday. We’re only off to North Devon, but the break will do us good!

I’ve done 15 minute stints so far for 45 mins and am now on my break. So far I did bedroom floor tidying 15 mins, bin emptying/recycling sorted 15 mins, Halloween decoration removal and storage 15 mins, followed by however long it took to empty the washing machine and hang out the stuff to dry, then a 15 or so min break on the PC with a glass of water.

Off I go again!

About to move house… again! 4 times in as many years. Living in paphos, Cyprus. the thought of moving myself, my boyfriend, my daughter (18mnths) and all of our crap is very disheartening. I don’t even want to move in the first place. We have so much stuff and between the two of them they are so untidy. I seem to spend my entire day running round after them and working full time. I am vowing to buy lots of baskets and boxes and filing stuff in order to keep my new house looking half presentable. I don’t want anything on show other than photos and NICE things…. no toys outside of the playroom, no clothes laying on the floor, no food left out, no paperwork strewn all over the place… just nice pretty things.

Easily thought of….. hard to do i should imagine. If anyone has any ideas about making a cleaning schedule or a labelling system for filing etc i would REALLY appreciate it.

Its too damn hot here to think about much… 40+degrees today – 90% humidity!!!! argh!

x

this week. We had someone from the Foresters call round and took notes about all the insurance and stuff we have. He gave us his opinion for free about which to keep and which are a waste etc. Of course, he also tried to sell us some Life and Critical Illness cover but we didn’t sign up to anything and will think it over. On the good side we have three things to get on with:

1. Move husband’s private pension into his work’s pension
2. Find out cash value of Healthmaster and cash it in
3. Cancel Hospital plan (£34 a month!) as never need it

So have written to Hospital plan to cancel it, phoned about healthmaster to get a quote in the mail, and can do the pension thing anytime soon.

Cos he was coming round I gave the fridge a superb clean and tidy, and cleaned under it too (lucky penny!) Then I find it is one of Flylady’s missions this week anyway!
Another good thing was I went through all the financial files and got my head around them. I also shredded lots of papers as I had kept years worth of statements which I didn’t need.

Starting with getting bathed and dressed on waking, before coming on the PC or doing school lunches. It is difficult because I go to bed late each night, and wake up tired and keep hitting the snooze button. But for three days I have done this. Yesterday wasn’t so good because I got tied up doing stuff for the kids between getting up and getting dressed, but I can see that it was unavoidable – unless I had got up earlier! Thats where another of my goals comes in – early to bed, early to rise!

I’ve been better at doing important jobs and not putting them off, and I should feel proud for that. Little by little my more organized life should come together.

but today I got sent this:

For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to
begin (real life) but there was always some obstacle in
the way, something to be gotten through first, some
unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to
be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles
were my life.
Alfred D’Souza

Well it’s finally here…day one…the first day of the rest of my life? who knows, all i know is i have to do something to get my life back on track, my children need me to be more organised, how come i can manage a store, it runs like clockwork, but my home is a mess? from tomorrow my life shall emerge like a butterfly.

It is hard – I go through times of forgetting to have a routine at all to suddenly picking up where I should be. The house would be so much cleaner, tidier and nicer to be in if I just kept these routines up, not to mention quicker because I wouldn’t have tons of old dirt and dust, clutter etc to pick up each day.

Since I mopped on Tuesday I have swept the floor each morning and it still looks fresh and clean. Actually I had to mop again this morning cos last night my son’s iron brew exploded all over the kitchen floor and was still sticky after 2 wipe ups. So with little effort I feel it is still looking good.

The trick will be to apply this attitude to other rooms of the house.

On Friday I ‘jumped right in’ and when the Flylady mission arrived (sweep and mop floors) I stopped my procrastinating and got on with mopping the kitchen and hall floors. I felt much better after that. I have this tendency to see the missions as they come in and put them off saying I will get to them later. Later never seems to come, so I hold on to them for weeks sometimes before deleting them for a fresh start. How silly :)
I’ve been trying to get on top of the ‘hot spots’ of clutter around the house. It’s one thing clearing them, quite another getting items to their proper homes or actually chucking them in the bin. I’ve also been working on my concertina file of frequently used papers – so far I have this:
slot 1 – wage slips
slot 2 – bank statements from past 3 months
slot 3 – my mobile bills from past 3 months
slot 4 – hubby’s mobile bills ” ” ”
slot 5 – quarterly landline bills from past year
slot 6 – call bills from past 6 months (separate company from landline rental – I intend to resolve this and find a better deal all round)
slot 7 – gas bills from past year
slot 8 – credit card bills from past 3 months
slot 9 – store card bills ” ” ”
There are several empty slots and it’s an upright narrow concertina file in which the papers stand vertically rather than horizontally which is unusual but really easy to see headings at a glance when flicking through, and any earlier info if really urgent I can always get hold of online I’m sure. I also went through my old folder and threw out lots of unnecessary leaflets such as info for householders of facilities in my area, all sorts of stuff I can find out on the local government’s website.
I only made a dent in it really, there are still so many files and folders to go through and try to be ruthless (yet again, as each time I do this I seem to be redefining what I consider a waste of space or worth keeping). I hold onto so much crap in my personal file that I should probably chuck out too. My usual categories for filing are really simple:
Health (top priority!)
wages and tax related
Financial
utilities
credit card and receipts
personal files for each of us
holiday information
home insurance
life insurance
premium bonds
Computer
Product information
appliance insurance
pension
Within these categories I can usually find a home for every paper worth saving. However I need to streamline it, at least our personal files and now that Credit card is in my concertina file (and I chucked out all the bumph that came with it, again info that can be found and up to date on their websites) I might make another slot be the receipts section, and put any receipts worth saving in a large envelope to be cleared out regularly.
I’m a little annoyed with myself as a few things are still kicking about – but maybe in a minute I will put them in their places. I also need to shred all the papers I am throwing away, I have already removed all the envelopes from their plastic windows ready for composting, and all the leaflets for going in the recyling! Let’s see how long I take to get around to shredding this big pile of personal papers. I’ll be positive and say it will be done today :)
Any comments on all this are welcome!

I need to organize my life properly so that it runs smoothly. Already good intentions (since I got a new shower rail) with jumping in the shower on waking have fallen by the wayside – as my son bathed and caused a leak into the room below – so the bath seal needs fixing, and until then I am mainly having baths – this is terrible for my morning routine as by the time it has finished running I have started being distracted by the computer! I must fix the seal and in the meantime trust my showering technique (angling the jet of water toward the shower curtain so it doesn’t flood through the suspected gap at the bath edge) which never caused a leak before he and his half hour (!) shower with the jets pointing straight down caused one.

Putting my clothes out the night before was working for me too, and this too keeps getting forgotten lately. WHile it worked it meant I was jumping in the shower for ten mins, drying etc, jumping straight into my clothes. Then I would have breakfast and put together the kids’ lunches which I had prepared the night before (another thing that gets forgotten some days).