This is Rough

I am so ready to give up on the 31 Days to Declutter Your Life.  I just can't seem to keep up.  I am doing pretty good at keeping the living room clean, but the dining room, where our table is a catch all when we all get home from school/work, the bathroom, where the laundry never-ever ends and the girls' room are always a disaster.  Our kitchen counters are also a place for clutter to gather, not to mention how awful our bedroom is!

I may need to start calling in the reinforcements.  I am planning on scheduling a day one weekend in March  (or April because we have some pretty full weekends in March) to have a 'let's clean Jessica's house' party.  I will be sure to have lunch, drinks and snacks ready for those who come over to help.  I think I just need Jason to get the girls out of the house for a day so I can go through everything without little hands pulling it back out of the Goodwill boxes that I put it in.

I will keep plugging away, but I think I am going to pause on my 31 Days to Declutter Your Life and pick it up at a later time.  I am a very poor blogger to my fans (not that I have too many right now), and for that I apologize.  I guess I shouldn't have started with such a time consuming blog series.  I thought it was going to help me get my life organized, but I have felt like I haven't been able to keep up and it gets me down.  I will be posting more often, however, they will be random topics.  :-)

31 Days to Declutter Your Life - DAY 14 (Office)

We have 2 bedrooms upstairs and a landing in between the two.  Mac(kenzie), our oldest had one room, Teagan, our second, had the other room and Skylee our third, was had her bed and things in the landing area.
Over Christmas break we decided to move all three girls into one of the bedrooms and use the other room as a play room.  This also left an open landing.  My desk/office area had been in a corner in our dining room and I suggested moving the desk and file cabinet upstairs to the landing, so that's what we did.

I thought that was a great idea.  It opened up our dining room and gave me my own work space for Thirty-One.  The only problem is that the girls thing that means they can play there too because the area is in between the play room and their bedroom.  The girls will make forts in this area and try to play in the space under my desk. This is what it looks like at its worst.

Yesterday, after Emery's birthday party (our youngest), my mother-in-law took Teagan and Skylee.  Today school was cancelled and while Emery was napping and Mac was playing I decided to conquer

this area.  I started with garbage.  I grabbed myself a plastic bag and started pitching.  In my decluttering process I am not keeping things that are broken that I MIGHT be able to fix at a later time. I just want it GONE.  I started throwing away any papers the girls had gotten out/colored/written on and small toys that were broken and not going to be missed.  Any toys that needed to go into either the play room or their bedroom went into a box and there was a second box for all of the toys that could be donated.  

After this was done, it was easy to get my desk/office area looking good.  I will admit that I did not go through the drawers of the desk or file cabinet.  That will be for a later time.  I just wanted it looking good for now.  

Here is my AFTER picture.  :-)  I was very pleased!!

31 Days to Declutter Your Life - DAY 12 & 13 (Retrace Steps)

This weekend I have been going back and retracing the steps I have already taken to make sure the rest of the house isn't falling behind.  I need to do this more often.  I tend to get lazy during the week because I am so wore out from work and don't want to do anything when I get home, but then I find myself cleaning and doing laundry like crazy on the weekends to try to catch up from what I let go during the week.  I don't get to enjoy my weekends as much because I am too worried about getting the house work done.

I have been looking for a quick cleaning checklist online.  Not sure if something like that will help, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to look.  If I find something I will be sure to post it.


Here are some (more embarrassing) pictures of what is yet to come in my decluttering journey.