Warning: this post is text heavy. You may want to read this instead of your next book for book club. Also, an advance warning: the only nice photos you'll see in this post are the ones of the entire room that were from previous posts. Otherwise, the nitty gritty photos are well... real life... and by "real life" I mean very unfinished spaces.
I've had a couple of people ask recently how I keep my house so clean, simple and uncluttered. First of all, I don't. Not all the time.
I have a couple of piles in my kitchen right now, just like the next person, that I need to go through. And they've been there for over a week. But, AJ and I both will say, that for the most part we have a place for everything. So, our house could look like a disaster, which it does often throughout the day, because Drew will throw out every toy from his toy box in the living room and then empty our spice drawer and pots and pans onto the kitchen floor. Often I have books scattered over the kitchen floor and a fire engine is sitting right next to me as I type this and a hedgehodge is on the seat with me (not a live one, thank goodness!).
When I was in college my friend Naomi used to torture me and come in my room and mess up something just to see how long I could stand it. I would fix it while she was still in the room (can we say "OCD"?). I was neurotic about a clean and organized space until AJ and I got married and we bought our first house to flip three days after tying the knot. And then everything went to pot (well, at least in my eyes). I had piles of laundry I hadn't taken care of! We had STUFF everywhere in our guest bedroom! Our condo was 800 square feet and we needed oodles more space. Our guest bedroom couldn't house people because it had extra supplies for the flip (insulation, saws, etc). It made me batty but we couldn't do anything about it.
Then we moved in February 2010 to our current house. It had double the amount of square footage the condo had! 1600 whopping square feet! We never wanted to use the current master bedroom as living space because it was so gross so we just stored a few things in there until we started living in it full time when Meredith was in the hospital and we had family with us each weekend.
If Drew wasn't around I could whiz around and clean (I don't just mean straighten up) the house in an hour and a half or two hours. I clean the bathroom every week, Monday mornings while Drew is at the sitter so he doesn't breathe in the wonderful smell of bleach, and I try to make cleaning fun for Drew throughout the week (I always like cleaning, I think it's fun and it's cheaper than therapy) and let him push the vacuum or Swiffer. He loves it. In fact, sometimes he tries to ride on our vacuum or balance on top of it. But then I tell him that he's not a little circus act doing bareback riding standing up on a horse so he needs to get off.
KITCHEN
Most mornings I'll do dishes after Drew finishes his breakfast so I don't have any left over from the night before. Often AJ and I are dead tired in the evenings so at least a couple will get left in the sink overnight. The dishwasher is run every day or every other day. Drew loves to get the dishwashing liquid and fill it up. When I empty the dishwasher I assemble the Tupperware. I know that seems like I'm wasting space this way but it doesn't matter to me... it is so much easier to find the size, with the lid I want, in the morning while making AJ's lunch. Our buffet holds extra dish towels that don't fit into the drawer, napkins (cloth and paper), extra plates and the coffee maker.
OFFICE / PAPERS
AJ is amazing at keeping our papers filed and organized. The desk upstairs in the guest bedroom looks a little disorganized now (ie: not as good as it looks in the photo below) but I know he's got a system going so I try to stay out of it. Because we have a number of rental properties he really has to stay organized and he has folders for everything and keeps a different checkbook for each property. We keep a large file cabinet in the guest bedroom closet where it's out of sight yet is still useable.
MASTER BEDROOM / BATHROOM STORAGE
We lucked out with our master bedroom and were able to create two closets out of dead space that was previously drywalled in. In one closet I keep all my running clothes and PJs and the other we use as a linen closet because there wasn't one with the house. Speaking of linen closet... we needed a space for all of our products that we aren't using every single morning and have them in a skinny cabinet behind our master bedroom door. It's perfectly situated in between our current bathroom and the disaster area that we are going to turn into our master bathroom when someone hands us a wad of spare change.
Eeek I can't believe I'm showing you this awful picture. A) because it's blurry and B) because it's gross. AJ's clothes are on the top rack, mine are the bottom. They aren't organized but I did just pull out all my summer clothes and have them in the bin under my regular waredrobe. We have put about zero man hours into this closet so I hope to have some nicer photos to show when we have the time to put into it.
I have some towels in the guest bedroom in a basket for guests, I have beach towels on the second shelf, clean sheets that I roll instead of fold on the third shelf, and on the third shelf more sheets, a bag of stuff for Salvation Army and a basket of washcloths. Blankets and pillows are stored behind the shelving unit. The green bag is for our dirty clothes.
I try to keep everything out in the open in our little toiletries cabinet, that way I can easily see when I need to purchase more stuff. Our cleaning supplies are on the top shelf now because I just used them but normally they are in the basket on the top shelf so there is no chance Drew could get to them.
DREW'S ROOM
We have a pretty good system for Drew's stuff. It's called "give it to people who need it". We've given a lot of clothes to Patrick, our nephew, and then a lot of Drew's gear (swing, vibrating seat, etc) to my friend Danielle for her baby Charlie. We knew we could get back any of that stuff if a second child were to come along. The clothes we haven't temporarily given away is in the basement in large Rubbermaid containers by size.
His closet contains his dress shirts and and some jackets on the hangers. The shelves (not pictured) hold wipes, sheets and the extra changing pad cover. The boxes on the closet floor contain diapers, baby blankets, books (that he's not old enough for yet). On a regular basis I clean out his drawers and closet of anything that doesn't fit him. I have an ongoing bag of those items that I keep to eventually bring down to his Rubbermaid bins.
BASEMENT
There is no way I'll ever photograph this for you, until it's a "before" photo for our renovation down there. It's pretty rough looking, but we understand how everything works. We have some furniture, and a claw foot tub, down there that we intend to refinish. We may or may not use the items in this house but aren't getting rid of them because they are unique or have sentimental value (the claw foot tub is from the cottage my great-grandparents owned and we went to every summer growing up). I have my stash of stuff for events down there, all gift wrapping supplies, anything Drew has outgrown, all our tools, paints and lawn supplies.
...
Have you made it this far? If so, I'm shocked.
See, nothing life-changing, we just keep up with cleaning (mostly) and don't buy things we don't need. One thing that has been so helpful for us is that we don't have tons of spare change now so we can't shop whenever we want to...
Okay, I'm signing off now from this novella. :)
