Well, I’m finally getting around to getting rid of my piles that have seem to taken over ever single surface available in this house.  I actually found this pretty cool website that has a cleaning list for everyday chores, weekly, monthly and seasonal.  It doesn’t have some of the stuff that I do daily, like clean the litter box and stuff like that, but other than that, it’s great.  Here’s the link!  The planners are right above the comment section.  My husband was very impressed when he saw that yesterday.  He said, “Oh, that’s cool!”  He wondered where I got it from and I said that I downloaded it from a website and he sort of smiled and said, “That’s really cool.”  After a few beats, he wrinkled his nose and said, “How much did you pay for it?”  I chuckled and said, “Nothing.  It was free.” 

All I know is that I have a hard time knowing where to start, so, if you’re anything like me, this is a great tool.  I know, it must seem silly to some other people who don’t have this problem to have such a list and trust me, I wouldn’t keep it posted if I had company (because that just looks strange to them).  But it’s not that I don’t know how to clean, because that I do know how to do.  My parents made sure that they taught me (except that we never cleaned house after my brother and I had gotten over the age of 10).  We lived in piles of papers and everything was stacked into usually not-so-neat piles.  The floors were almost always clear, but never clean.  The dog that we had was never fully potty trained and frequently urinated on the floor.  The bathroom in the house that we grew up in was only cleaned when it got REALLY bad, but the kitchen was cleaned daily.  I know, because my brother and I did it (at least until I started working, and then he pretty much did it on his own)

For me, I just get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start.  Then, I become paralyzed because it gets in such bad shape and then I get a bit depressed.  My husband liked it because he likes to-do lists.  He likes to be able to see things checked off–even if you really can’t see much progress, you can look back on the list and say, “Yeah, I did that already.”  I’m not really a list kind of gurl, but I found this to be helpful.

What’s cool about this list is you can pretty much start anywhere you want to.  I go from top to bottom and it starts with the “wet areas”–the kitchen, then the bathroom.  Then, moving on to the bedrooms and laundry, to the living room/den and finally the hallway and stairs.  Once everything’s cleaned up, it should just be maintenance cleaning and that’s pretty easy to deal with.  I can totally handle that.  They say it takes 3 weeks to form a habit, so if I get into the habit, the list shouldn’t be necessary anymore.

But anyway…

I know that many of you are praying for my BiL and I just want to say thanks.  He’s doing much better.  He’s going to start seeing a nutritionist and other doctors in the next couple of weeks.  I think they are going to wait for a couple of weeks to make sure that everything has stabilized.  It turned out that he didn’t have a heart attack at all, so that was good news.