I hate cleaning and quite frankly, I'm really bad at it. It's an area of my life that I have always struggled with. And I'm not happy about it either. It stresses me out to have a messy, dirty house. The house has gotten worse since Brad has been home. I think mostly because when I get stressed, my safety mode is to hide and do nothing. Well, yesterday I finally forced myself to face reality. I need help. Several years ago, I used FlyLady to help get me on track. I think I'm going to use her website for inspiration, but try to create a system that works for our family. All of the websites that I read last night on household cleaning schedules, kept saying over and over again that you have to create a schedule yourself for it to work. Today, I've been working on the kitchen - mopped the floor and finished washing the dishes so we can start fresh tomorrow. I've also been working on our endless piles of laundry. I don't think I've ever actually been caught up on the laundry. Tonight we're going to have a family meeting so we can come up with morning and evening routines for everyone in the family. Simple steps to help us all start out the day on the right foot. Having a consistent routine was one of the things that helped me so much in the past. Then we're going to use Flylady's zones to help us get started. This coming week's zone is the living room. I think it's going to be a great place to start since it's the first place we see when we walk into the house. And the first place anyone else sees if they knock on the door. Right now my plan is to use her zones to get the house under control and then reevaluate to see if I want to come up with something different for our family. I felt like I needed to post this to help keep me accountable. Sometimes I come up with great plans and then never follow through. So, in one month, I'm committing to posting my progress.
4 comments:
good for you!
Laundry is the ONLY thing i can keep up with. I love getting it put away and seeing an empty laundry basket. The papers, toys, fabric is what i struggle with.
Laundry is the only thing I ever seem to get done too. I think it's my scape goat, since I actually don't mind doing it, so whenever I "clean" I always start with the laundry. The problem is then nothing else ever gets cleaned in our house! I like your plan though of setting up a schedule, and the idea of zones sounds intriguing. I'll have to check out that website!
When my kids were the age of yours, a psychologist friend of our laid out a plan for us. Basically, you list ALL the jobs of the household (paying bills, laundry, cooking, cleaning, getting the mail, getting groceries - everything, absolutely everything). Then you sit down and have a family meeting. You pass the list around and everyone picks one job each round until all the jobs are selected. That's it. There is usually only one person who messes up the system... Mom... she continues to go ahead and do everyone else's jobs. But you can't. If you do, they system won't work. If a job doesn't get done, the whole family suffers. You have to be pretty specific witht he jobs. The idea is that everyone takes ownership. Also, along with this, if anyone leaved anything lying around, it goes in a box with their name on it and they don't see it for a week... more or less depending upon the age.
When I started reading this post, I was going to suggest you check out Flylady. Funny. I get her emails every day, and should be using them, but I don't. Good luck getting your act in gear! I'm trying myself.
Post a Comment