I hate that so many things in my life were affected by election season, but it really did take over my life. I’m finally feeling like things are normal again for me, but I’m still dealing with what happened when I let other things in my life slide because I didn’t have the time or energy to deal with them.
When things aren’t normal, it’s stressful in so many ways. But one way that I was stressed was by the lack of cleaning I had done in my house. While I’m not the cleanest person I know, I still do daily cleaning and try to do weekly deep cleaning. I thought with having a small house that it wouldn’t be as hard to clean, but I feel like having a small house actually can make things worse. Dirt and dust seem to appear so quickly, but that’s probably because there’s less surface area for them to land on. And clutter is definitely a problem with a small house. I try my best to limit what I bring into my house, but last month things just started to pile up.
I was avoiding doing the cleaning I needed to for a little while. I want to claim that I needed some downtime to recover before getting back to things, but honestly, it was just being lazy. But this week, I had to get my act in gear. First, the messiness was starting to really bother me and I could feel that I wasn’t in the best headspace. But also, my parents are in town now and I want to have a clean house for them. I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind if my house was a little messy, but I don’t like having it that way. And it’s not as clean as I would like it to be, but it’s significantly better than it was before.
Besides doing all the cleaning, I had to get my house back in order. I’m still working on the organization part, but I was able to get a lot done this week. And in that organization, I started to get rid of things. There are so many things I was holding on to for no good reason that I just needed to toss or add to a donation pile. I know that most of those things had some sentimental reason at one point, but it’s been so long that they are now meaningless junk. And there is no reason to keep them in my house and taking up the limited space I have. Maybe if I was in a bigger house, I’d find a way to keep them. But it’s probably better that I have a little space so I am forced into a more minimalistic lifestyle.
I did try to work on the cleaning and organizing a little bit each day for the beginning of the week. I didn’t want to get overwhelmed in the middle of working on it and making things more of a mess. I actually managed to figure out a good schedule because I never felt like I was trying to do too much. In fact, many days I actually felt motivated to do a bit more than I planned to do. It helped to make things go by and I was able to do almost everything I wanted to do with organizing and getting rid of things.
I still have a few more organizing projects that I want to work on, but I didn’t worry about them this week. They can wait and things don’t look too messy while they aren’t done. But I do want to get more of my house feeling as put together as the main spaces do. It’s been a huge relief to feel like things are clean and nice looking and I want to make even more of my house feel like that. Those extra projects require purchasing some things to help me and I haven’t found the perfect things to use yet. For example, I need new drawer organizers and I haven’t found a set I like. The ones I am using are cheap ones I got and I realized that while they worked I never loved them. I kept them until they started to fall apart (about 4 years) so it’s time to find a replacement that I want to have. But since there’s no urgency to get that done, I can take the time to find the perfect thing instead of spending money on something I don’t really like.
Even though I’m not totally done with my organizing, I got a huge chunk of it done and I feel so accomplished. And hopefully, I’m able to keep things up and not let my house get back to how it was just a week ago.
