#5 Homeward Bound – Clean & Organized, Part I

#5 Homeward Bound – Clean & Organized, Part I

Funny, Amazing, Shocking experience alert! 

But first, let me catch you up on what’s been happening. I finished up the the first four Homeward Bound posts--I hope you remember the three legs, or the supporting posts, or the necessary foundation for creating a home where you love living your “at home” portion of life! They are:

• Creating feelings you love in your home.
• Creating your personal style of function in your home.
• Creating flow that meets your needs and lifestyle.

Next, I took a deep breath and plunged on—writing perhaps a 10,000 page volume about having a Clean and Organized home, but I haven’t posted a single word because I’ve been so intimidated by the ginormous topic.

How could I—little me, who isn't perfect in anything—write about being clean and organized? And where would I start? With the grime above the upper kitchen cabinets? The cobwebs by the front porch light that have snagged so much dirt they hang down at nose level and sway in the breeze? Maybe with the edges of the carpet beside the baseboards that look faded and dingy because of dust? Should I mention the hidden place under the kitchen sink where science experiments grow, or the back of the broom closet infested with lost and found items long ago forgotten, or under the stairs where monster piles of stuff lurk? (None of these are in our houses, BTW, but we’ve all stumbled upon them somewhere and seen them!)

Each writing attempt stalled out and ground to a halt. I’d write a bit, falter, take up researching, attempt writing again, only to falter once more and return to research. With surmounting failures, I analyzed, observed, read piles of material, perused blogs and articles, examined, and learned some amazing things. However, my desire to understand the depth and scope of what it means to be clean and organized began crippling me until finally my perceptions changed and I caught onto the underlying truths.

The time arrived for me to break out of the metaphorical body cast I'd plastered on myself and be free to share what I've learned. 

Here goes—this is the blog post you don’t want to read, and maybe shouldn’t, and probably won’t. And, I won’t even promise that if you do read this, it will be worth your time (although the next posts will be worth it, so if you skip this one, come back soon). 

Feeling, function and flow are essential for creating a wonderful home, and without questions or arguments, the next vital ingredients are to have a clean and organized home. 

Take a deep breath if you need to. I’ll take one as well, and then we'll go on. We knew this was coming, whether we wanted to say or hear it. There is just no getting around it. There is no other way to state this: 

If your home is NOT clean at this moment, you understand the unsettled feeling of its condition. 

If your home IS disorganized right now, you know the weight that places on your mental condition. 

On the flip side, if your home IS clean, and if it IS organized, you understand how that feels. 

Let’s not kid ourselves about the 

differences these two aspects make

Clean & Organized rocks. Like your favorite music with a steady, sure beat. Like a cradle soothes a baby into peaceful slumber. Like the arms that hug you when you need encouragement or receive praise. Like the lofty rocky mountain peaks you love standing upon to view the world around you with wonder and awe after you've accomplished reaching the summit. 

Living clean and organized makes a huge, significant difference! 

True story:

A few days ago I carefully pushed my overloaded grocery cart into a checkout line. I was moving cautiously because perched on top of the load of food and household upkeep and cleaning items was a brand new broom. Because I’d already whacked myself in the shoulder a couple of times with the handle, and in the face, and almost toppled over one of those cardboard display shelves standing in the middle of an aisle, I was trying to avoid unintentionally knocking over an innocent shopper. I settled in line a safe distance from a woman unloading an even fuller cart on the conveyor belt. She finished, turned and scanned my load, and said to me—and this is no joke,

“Oh, you’re going to go home 

and get busy. Ewweh!”

What she said sounds like nothing, really, but there are no words to adequately replicate the sounds she made, her body language, and her facial expressions. But I can describe her tongue. She stuck it out, drooping it below her chin, and she looked and sounded like she was going to throw up. 

I jumped back!

Her eyes and that horrible purplish tongue said she was sick and dying from just looking at the broom and my selected cleaning supplies. 

Her expression said she’d rather die than do what she assumed I was planning on doing. 

Hoping to avoid witnessing her demise and having to step over her lifeless body and fill out an incident report with the police, I didn’t tell her she’d nailed it—I was not only going to sweep my floor, but I was excited about it, too!

To keep her alive, I shrugged and kind of laughed, and then I stopped laughing because the next sound I would have made would have killed her for sure. For months I had studied more about cleaning and organizing than anyone else on the face of the earth, I suspected, and my silence spared her from receiving my full “doctorate” dissertation covering home care, upkeep and order. 

I think my silence helped her pull that sickly tongue back into her mouth. (Exactly who in their right mind sticks out their tongue at a stranger, anyway?!)

So, lucky her—no lecture, and lucky me—no spontaneous death at check stand #4.

The next day someone mentioned work and another person commented, “drudgery.”

Back to back I witnessed two opinions without asking.

In all fairness, maybe these responses were only first impressions at the moment, and not their true feelings. Maybe they were opinions they felt everyone accepted and believed, or at least joked about, so they didn’t venture beyond them toward something more practical or logical. No matter what they thought, neither person shared anything positive or encouraging.

Cleaning our homes and organizing them will always be an ongoing job. But ongoing does not equate to drudgery or illness. Working our way to the finished product doesn’t cause death, or even a purple face and gross tongue unless we have some underlying health issue.

Let’s talk about the word work and its cousins: 

job, responsibility, task, duty, chore, 

assignment, burden, etc.

It doesn’t matter what we call work, which is what we do when we clean and organize, or what other specific or general terms we use. We probably agree that having and keeping a clean home, and having and keeping order in our homes, is something that will need to be done again and again. Its nature is ongoing and repetitive. It’s something that doesn’t just happen on its own but requires effort, and sometimes a lot of it.  

These two experiences created two opposing reactions in me. One was to quake in my boots even more when I considered writing about cleaning the home and keeping it clean, and creating order and keeping it orderly. I didn’t want to become someone’s target with a giant bull’s eye painted on me. I’d hate having anyone take aim and fire away at me with all the “buts,” “exception” and “howevers” stashed in their arsenal.

My other feeling was excitement to share ideas about cleaning and organizing, and hopefully inspire those who love it, as well as those who are struggling with it. I want what I share to become a piece of your support system, a part of your anchor, and be another spark of your inspiration.  

I’ll start with the bottom line, which is very simple, and we’ll build from there. The bottom line is this: Just do it.

Just roll up your sleeves, run the hot water, add something that creates suds, and just do it.

Just wipe it up, pick it up, clean it up, keep it up, and then just do it again.

Just fold it, put it away, check under the bed for whatever might be overlooked, and just finish what you begin.

Just stop the excuses and just do it.

The bottom line is this—if you truly want a beautiful home that you love and that loves you back, if you truly want to find the feelings there that you prefer to create, if you truly want your home to function the way you’d imagine in your best daydream, and if you truly want the flow in your home to wrap you in love and joy, then you have to clean and organize your home to a certain degree. And then you have to do it again and again and again and again….

Just do it! 

Meet me back here later for my favorite highlights and the best insights I received from mountains of research. I'll share the best tiny bits of what I gathered. I hope to inspire you to view your home in ways that help you clean and organize better than you ever have before, or to encourage you to not grow weary and give up in what you're already doing. The quest is to love our homes as fully as possible, and these are two key ingredients!

~~Blessings

Leona