Keeping your house under control
Jackie and I have both been really busy lately and we made a few choices while we had some time off that were probably not timed very well. We were busy remodeling the house, and then we helped some of Jackie's friends out that were moving, and finally we moved all of our furniture around and switched bedrooms. We did this all before summer session started and we are both taking two classes per session plus part time work and dealing with every day "stuff" on top of that. Now we have a sick dog that has to be cared for over the next few weeks.
Neither one of us like to clean, but a maid is pointless until we get everything organized and get pretty close to finished with remodeling. Today I'm going to try to tackle some of the disaster. I'm thinking of just doing it room by room. Currently our biggest problem in the house is that we have boxes and boxes of stuff with no place for it (we don't have a garage). I'm thinking of putting it all in a spare bedroom and just forgetting that the bedroom exists until I can tackle that. After the boxes we have paper everywhere that needs to be sorted and filed and then it is just dishes, vacuuming, dusting, etc...
What we really need is better organization. The cleaning isn't bad and if we needed we could get a maid to come in every other week or so when we are both busy like we are right now... but we really have to get the organization down first or it is pointless. Does anyone have any tips on home organization? Specifically boxes (the large Rubbermaid type), paper, mail, books, dogs. What do you do to keep your house clean and organized?
June 13th, 2010 - 14:29
I don’t know if ikea is too low class for you guys, but I have an expedit bookshelf with every cube cubby filled by a media box. It’s a fantastic way to organize stuff, and very easy to move because everything is already in boxes. Also, you can just throw crap in the boxes as messy as you want, and it still looks great from the outside.
June 13th, 2010 - 16:20
My favorite technique is to own fewer things I don’t need.
June 13th, 2010 - 18:50
Phil I think you hit the nail on the head.
June 14th, 2010 - 18:12
Good, now if you need to find a great way to get rid of stuff, let me know
June 14th, 2010 - 18:13
I mean, if you do find a good way to get rid of stuff. I hate things that don’t let you delete or edit your comments, btw.
June 13th, 2010 - 17:54
Hire a maid.
Do it now.
It will incent you to organize.
June 13th, 2010 - 20:43
So I’ve made a ton of progress today in reorganizing our house. Instead of turning the spare room into a junk room I have decided to make it storage/functional. If I were to just randomly stick things inside of there it would stay in the back of my head and keep irritating me. I’m trying to do it right from the ground up. It will take a little more time, but I think it will be worth it.
Jackie has proven useful by getting me a six pack of Speakeasy Big Daddy IPA.
June 14th, 2010 - 19:01
Wait…JMP doesn’t have a fleet of Roomba’s by now?
June 14th, 2010 - 19:02
oh…and get OpenID support for the blog please
June 14th, 2010 - 21:29
Done
June 21st, 2010 - 07:33
Two tricks that have helped me a ton in getting organized:
1) Everyday I vow to do at least a sinkful of dishes and take out one bag of garbage (not a difficult task if you have a ton of stuff laying around – goodbye old magazines)
2) When sorting things, the moment I run across something that doesn’t have a specific place, I create a place. Making a space for all your things is a basic but took me a while to figure out. Square bins that pull out like drawers from Target helped a ton with this.
July 23rd, 2010 - 09:20
my girlfriend is going to give me an ipad on my birthday this month.:”`