Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Clutter vs Company -- Which Would You Prefer To Have Visit Your Home?

Whoosh! That was quite the first day of my clutter journey!

I wish I could have posted the after pictures earlier in the day than I did, but all in all it turned out all right.

The next item is to get the house ready for visitors. Our sweet baby boy is going to be baptized on Sunday (January 10). So, I want the house to be just as tidy as it was (or better if I could!) for our family Christmas party.

I will start by the back door which opens into the kitchen and then move to the dining room/living room and the bathroom. I'm just going to concentrate first on clearing off the surfaces in those rooms since that should help give the illusion of a tidy home. Sneaky, huh!

Here are the before pictures of the surface clutter in those rooms.








It doesn't look too bad, does it? Having the kids pick up after themselves seems to work pretty well. Also, doing some picking up as part of my morning routine helps.

AFTER PICS

Well, I goofed. I didn't start in the kitchen like I said I was going to, but was in the living room/dining room first. Oh well, not a big deal. Anyway, it was really deceiving to me how much time I needed to spend on sorting the stuff on the kitchen table when the other areas cleaned up so quickly.



One thing I couldn't believe that we let build up like that was the 82 cans of Coke Zero! They are waiting in the garage for when I go to the grocery store. The suitcase still had some clothes left in it from our New Year's trip to my folks. The clean ones are back in the drawers and the dirty ones went into the laundry room.



All I needed to do in the living room was to recycle some paper and put the books away. The empty bottle in the bathroom got tossed into the recycling bin. I didn't take any after shots of the living room or bathroom because it was easy to see the finished result there. The set of dishes on the counter in the kitchen are the holiday ones. They were used during Christmas and were waiting for me to put them in their storage container in the basement.

So, I'm not completely finished with this since I still need to clean up/put away the stuff around the kitchen table. But that's okay because I could see some progress.

Now, I'd love to hear from you. Is your house company-ready at all times or do you struggle with getting (or keeping!) it that way?

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