Housekeeping update

So I know you all have been sitting on pins and needles wondering about my house keeping skills lately.... Have they improved?  Did she locate that one kid that was missing in all the clutter? Was her husband able to find clean underwear last week?  Yes, no, and yes. 

No, for real, things have improved much.  One might notice a correlation with the improvement of my house and the decreased blog posts.  Then again, one might not notice that.

So what's been working for me?  Just doing it.  Sounds ridiculously simple but I can't even begin to tell you how many hours cumulatively I've spent planning out my cleaning, or reading about how other people clean, or wallowing in my lack of cleaning skill.

So here's what it looks like:

I have been a part of a few FB groups related to the 31 days to clean e-book.  One of them started doing "challenges" and it just caught on like wildfire, now there are at least four challenges in a day and often more.  You join in when you can and you don't when you can't.  You jot a list of four items and whomever is hosting the challenge posts a number and you go spend 10 min on that task on your list.  In the middle we take a 10 min break.  So with going over the 10 min here and there we spend about an hour and generally come out of it with much cleaner homes.  It has been SUPER helpful in helping me just keep the downstairs tidy.

So today I was browsing around some blogs and came across what I thought was a super neat idea that I want to translate into my own thing over here.  She was doing a 31 days of details challenge for herself.  It started Oct 1st and so she's half done at this point.  Reading some of her 31 days of details posts I thought "I need to do something like that too!"  So I know it's the middle of the month and all but I need to do this.  Keeping the house tidy is great but there are still piles of clutter throughout that genuinely drive me nuts.  But I just never can seem to make the time for them.  So I'm going to plan ahead.

I lesson planned for the kids today and it's so nice to see at a glance what I will accomplish in school for the week (or rather what the kids will accomplish).  And likewise I am going to clean plan.  I can't have a rigid schedule because my 4 small children make that pretty much impossible.  But I can have a list of the things I need to accomplish each day and do them one by one.  So I'm challenging myself from now until Thanksgiving to clean a "detail" each day.  I'll take pictures and post once a week with the details I do all in one post.  Hopefully this will be the thing I need to get that last bit of decluttering done around here.  Less clutter makes it easier to clean.  It truly does.