speed cleaning

I'm the first to admit that I'm not a natural housekeeper. It takes a lot of thought and effort on my part to keep this place running somewhat smoothly.

Yes, I'm not always on top of things, and we still run out of clean undies on occasion, but I must say - I think I have improved dramatically from those early days. Newly married, first time living out of home, I'd find out we were to expect some surprise guests; "Oh, you'll be here in ten minutes? Great! See you soon!" Crap, crap, crap! A frenzy would ensue, normally consisting of shoving all of the stuff lying around the place into a cupboard and forcing the door shut.

Our guests would enter our 'tidy' home and we'd have an enjoyable time hanging out. I'd glance nervously at that cupboard every now and then, praying that the door wouldn't bust open at that very moment, revealing all the clutter I was so desperate to hide.

The other problem with my method of tidying was that I'd never actually get around to putting that stuff away properly. The cupboards would be filled to capacity with junk and we could never find anything!

I am finally getting a bit better at cleaning up as I go. Actually filing those papers rather than shoving them in a drawer, for example. However, as those of you with children (or nieces and nephews) would be aware of, lots of bits and pieces can easily accumulate around the house - the floor, mainly, at our place. Parts from toys and other things that "I'm just looking at, mum". Not much at first, but all of a sudden it's everywhere and out of control. (Actually, who am I kidding? I could create that kind of mess just by myself!) Most of the time I wouldn't even know where to start, so I'd just leave it.

But now, I've devised a way to save time and put things away properly. I'm certain this is nothing new. But I was excited about it and wanted to share. All you need is a washing basket! (...or a box if all the washing baskets are still filled with clothes needing to be folded and put away)

I will do a sweep through the whole house grabbing everything lying around on the floor and put it in a washing basket. I then take the washing basket full of random bits to a room in the house, packing away what belongs there before moving onto the next room.
And voila! Heaps of time is saved and you can see the floor! 

the five-tab file

On top of organising all of my existing files, I have taken on board a system for sorting incoming mail. Enter the "five-tab plastic pocket", purchased from kikki.K for $5.95.
I love stationery, so was very excited to get something cool that also served an important purpose!

You can label the tabs on the pockets with whatever you want.
(I also inserted a sheet of textured green paper into the front sleeve to make it pretty.)

My categories are:

to pay
to do
to read
to save
to file


So, as mail comes in, it is immediately sorted into one of those categories, or put straight into the recycling. At the end of each week I will file everything in the "to file" pocket and we're ready to go again the next week!

I really recommend getting one of these if you need a better way of dealing with your snail mail.
When you use it properly, it is wonderful! 

What's not so 'wonderful' is the human in this equation. We have (mostly) managed to avoid random papers around the place, but my old self is trying to ruin the system. I am not sure where to keep this file, so I put it in the bookshelf near our dining table, so it would be out of the way. I then forgot about it for a little while until I got a letter in the mail to tell us our bills hadn't been paid. Whoops!
So I took the file, complete with the unpaid bills, in to my computer desk so I could pay them. The entire five-tab file then went missing for a couple of weeks!

Any suggestions on where we should keep our five-tab file?

the undies in the fridge

Now there's a thought. Putting on a pair of undies straight from the fridge! Brrrrrr

I would have to say that is the weirdest misplaced item I've found in our house to date.

I don't need a lot of help with spreading random junk around the house but, when small children are involved, you can end up with hilarious results. Often they are just things that have gone walkabout. Sometimes they are things I have confiscated - so end up out of reach near wherever I happen to be. This blog entry features just some of the strange things that I have discovered around our house.

Undies in the fridge (still don't know who put them there or why)













Basketball on the kitchen bench (confiscated item)

Play phone in the utensil drawer (who knows, while I'm cooking I may suddenly need to make an emergency call to Thomas the Tank Engine)

The ride-on-train. (You name it, we have found it in the back of this train. Keys, mobile phone, half-eaten food (!), kitchen utensils....)

The ever evasive 'Teddy' could turn up anywhere. Particularly annoying when Teddy goes missing and our dear child will not go to bed without him - I'm pretty sure Teddy gets lost at least once a day. (check the dirty laundry basket. yep, there he is. eewww)

Rock hard stale bread and one corn flake in the mini drawer from the book end. (must of been there for a while... placed inside so delicately)

Bowls from the kitchen turn up being worn as hats. We are often missing containers and mixing bowls. They become hats, 'fruit salad' mixing bowls, shopping baskets, drums, and more!

As an aside... funny story. James (left) holds two large bowls up in front of his chest and says "Look mum! I've got big booms!"
"You've got what!?" I reply
"Big BOOMS!" He repeats.
So, yeah - he had big 'booms', that is, two big loud drums. He usually calls them drums (or, more acurately, 'grums'), just not that time. Haha.


If we've ever lost a baby we look in the toy box. (actually, any box or opening)









Other things:
Egg whisk in my sock drawer, three matchbox cars in my shoe at one time (had to put my foot in before I noticed), play money down my top, my wallet in the cot (took me two days to find it - I didn't think to look there), last-nights left overs in the cupboard with the platters instead of in the fridge, entire car garage in the dirty clothes basket... actually if I keep going we may be here all day.

I mentioned my idea for this blog to a dear friend of mine who recalled finding a rolling pin in her freezer. She was living with two other ladies at the time and they still don't know how it got there.

Would love to hear about the weirdest misplaced item you have found in your house.

the refrigerator of doom

We returned home on Monday from our week long holiday to find that there was a bit of a 'smell' coming from the fridge. The 'sorting' of the fridge was meant to have been carried out soon after I wrote my last blog entry but it never happened. So all of the problem items inside the fridge had been there significantly longer than the time we were away, but that extra week seemed to tip them over the edge.

(And, needless to say, I won't be including any photos with this blog!)

I browsed through the upper shelves of the fridge thinking back over the meals of dinner-times past,
"oh yeah, that was once a yummy shepherds pie..." and finding all of the small plastic containers that I had lost. "So THIS is where they all got to!" Some had a few left over veggies, or bits of pasta that I had intended to use later. I also found half a lemon face down on a dish that had become as hard as cement! You should have heard the sound it made when I tapped it with a butter knife.

Embarrassingly, it gets worse...

I took one look inside the veggie drawer at the bottom of the fridge, quickly shut it and walked away.
Oh my goodness!! Most of the veggies were almost completely liquified! I could make out some sad looking capsicums and the remnants of a bag of green beans. There they were, all dissolving away into a putrid juice. Liquid gold, er, mould...

I buy fresh fruit and veg every week, but don't keep a good track of what is there already, so just keep taking from the top of the pile. Dear oh dear. Mistake.

While there is absolutely no excuse for the state things were in, I am going to make one anyway:
More often than not, at the time I am accessing the fridge, I will be grabbing things to feed hungry small people. They love their food and don't take kindly to waiting any longer than they have to. So I may notice a container with food from two weeks ago, make a mental note to remove it, then walk away and promptly forget.

I have decided now that I should put up with an extra couple of minutes of whinging and remove the suspect items straight away. I am sure it is a massive health and safety risk to leave bad food sitting there. At least, on this occasion, the bad things seemed to be restricted to their own containers or bags.

I have also begun dating things when I open them, such as tomato paste, so I can plan to use them up before they start to rot. And less waste is also an extremely good thing!

My husband suggested that a good time to remove things is before they turn to liquid. Noted. And a fair call too, since he and his iron stomach are the ones to clean out that drawer and completely wash it with soapy water. It is so lovely and sparkly now. (A million times thank you!!)

Together we have turned our refrigerator of doom into a refrigerator of DESTINY!

the 'rolling pantry'

We are lucky enough to have a decent sized kitchen. Unfortunately, though, it has one major flaw. There is no pantry. Which leaves us with 'the food cupboard.' When we moved in, this is the cupboard that seemed to make the most sense as a food storage area. To our dismay, after a few years of using this cupboard, what we are left with is an absolute atrocity!

Tins, jars, bottles and packets of food are crammed in, pushing whatever was unlucky enough to be there first further towards the back. Most of those items never to be seen again. I am certain a black hole has formed at the back of 'the food cupboard'.

Most of the time, in searching for, lets say - a can of diced tomatoes, we will remove half the contents of the cupboard only to discover that there are no canned tomatoes left. Instead, we find seven tins of tuna (!?) and a couple of packets of out-of-date pasta. As you can tell, there is absolutely no way to keep track of what is there or what we have run out of. It has been a source of much annoyance, too, when we reach in to get something and knock a dozen things onto the floor in the process. I feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about it.

Enter the rolling pantry! In my Google search for some in-cupboard storage solutions, I came across this fantastic contraption. It roped me in with it's blurb... "Imagine having six extra shelves for storing your packets, cans, bottles and jars!... this mobile pantry will wheel out of the way or roll into the narrowest space." This is the answer to our problem! I wrote down the measurements and set to work with the tape measure. Yes! It will fit perfectly next to our fridge!

So much hope was pinned on this fantastic pantry on wheels. I waited in anticipation for weeks. When it finally arrived, the box seemed far too small. Upon opening it, I discovered that this thing required a significant amount of 'assembling'. All I saw were planks of wood and a million tiny screws and wooden pegs. Basically, we had to build the thing from scratch. My husband and I actually had a fun time building the rolling pantry on Friday night, which is just as well, because it took a good few hours.

I was so excited to see it completely assembled in all it's glory! We nudged the fridge across a couple of centimeters, adjusted it's feet (it seems our walls have a slight lean to them) and rolled the pantry in beside it. It fits! I grabbed the handle to roll it back out again and it wouldn't move. It was stuck! What was going on? We quickly realised that the swiveling castor wheels were swinging out from beneath the edge of the pantry and into the wall as they were turning. Garrr!

Long story short... gaffer tape fixes most things but won't stop wheels from swiveling and the pantry is now in the laundry. I am going shopping for some fixed castor wheels some time in the next few days. Will this solve the problem? Time will tell....

I really hope this story has a happy ending.

one step forward, two steps back

Unfortunately, this title is not a reference to dancing. It is a reference to my attempts at being tidy. Tidiness is something that I struggle with anyway, but add some other factors into the mix and it feels that all this 'organisation' business is just impossible!

Firstly, living with someone who is equally as messy makes things difficult. It can mean two times the mess and it can mean it is harder to find things, because you weren't the one that put it away, so who knows where it could be? Where we choose to put things always makes sense to us, but will usually remain a mystery for the other person involved.

For example, I have noticed that there always seems to be an outfit in a mound near our front door. I cannot figure out why this seems like the best place to put these clothes, but there they are. So I move this mound into our bedroom where gradually another mound is added and then another... it then becomes at least a half-hour job to sort through the mounds of clothes and put them away or, if they fail the sniff test, into the dirty clothes basket.

Likewise, I am sure my husband is stumped when it comes to where I leave some things. We lost our one and only cooking turner. For weeks we could not find the stupid thing. We improvised of course, but flipping pancakes with something spoon-shaped is quite a challenge! Anyway, one day I got fed up and went out to buy another one (actually I got two, in case we misplaced one). That same night I went to use our stick blender, so I pulled the box down from the top of the tallest cupboard, and the turner fell out onto my head! I am sure it was me who put it up there, but even I couldn't tell you why that made sense. We now have three non-stick cooking turners.

Now back to what I was talking about in the first place...
My plans for being tidy are also thwarted by my dear children. I now have two active boys that follow me around the house pulling things off the shelf I had just 'restocked', or spilling their food onto the floor I just vacuumed, or asking to play with that train set that they just saw me packing away.

In the end, it is this that brings it all into perspective. I am not going to be a kill joy when it comes to the children playing and having fun and making a mess, and I am certainly not striving to have a 'display home', but I just really want to create a more orderly space (especially behind the scenes) where things are kept in places that can be located and make sense. I am hoping that this will then flow into life in general and I can keep a better track of day to day things.  I feel like I could be a better wife and mum if these things are more in control. (I'll certainly feel less stressed if I can find my keys when I'm ready to walk out the door.)

And, when it comes down to it, I will pick reading a book to my children over stacking the dishwasher any day.

the uprising of the socks

I hate socks. I know hate is a strong word, but I do. I hate them. I hate wearing them, I hate that they end up in every room of the house, I hate pegging them on the clothes line and I hate hate hate folding them to be put away.

Every day (or two, or three) I go through the house gathering up the socks to be added to the wash. I need to check inside all the shoes too because the socks like to hide there. Then into the washing machine and onto the clothes line... then in a few days, when I need space to hang out the next load, I put them into a basket and they are moved into our bedroom. After another few days (or several) I finally attempt to put the clothes away. This is when I discover that all except one pair of socks have lost their partner! How did this happen? Where could they have gone? Do they have a personal vendetta against me? It is a profound mystery. And, it is darn annoying.

I will usually leave the odd socks out on the bed with the aim of finding their pair but, inevitably, it becomes time to get into bed so they get shoved into the sock draw as they are.

This is the actual pair of socks my husband
chose to wear to work this morning!

There was a time a while ago when I noticed my husband's socks were never matching after being washed. Not even the usual one or two complete pairs were being spat out. What was going on? Then, all was revealed. I witnessed him putting his shoes on for work one morning, and I saw that he was just wearing odd socks to begin with! So he just grabbed the first two socks that touched his hand. Green with blue. Blue with black. Black with playing cards (?). He had become sick of the fruitless searching inside the mess of his sock draw. It seemed no sock had a pair.

So, my solution was to buy more socks. You may be surpried to know that this didn't solve the problem. It made it worse. And so the saga continues...

I hate socks.

Does anyone have any advice?
How can we improve this desperate situation??

why I need to get organised

Some days it is hard to find a clear path
through the house to walk on.

Hours of my life are wasted looking for things. I am often late to places because I can't find my house keys / sunglasses / the boys' hats / you name it. "Oh, of course the keys are on the bathroom sink. That is a perfectly logical place for them." I am being driven crazy by my own lack of anything even remotely resembling organisation.
So, when I saw that a friend was hosting a "Get Sorty" party - I was in. I saw this as my chance to get help - to make a change. I needed someone to point me in the right direction - to give me practical ideas. So much excitement was felt at the thought of hearing someone talk about how they organise their wardrobe. My situation must be bad.
A couple of nights ago, I sat with 21 other women at the first ever Get Sorty event. We listened to Ronnie - the epitomy of organisation. A lot of us were in awe, and terrified, at the same time. "Will I, too, have to compartmentalise my sock draw to be organised??"
Enter this blog. I want to share my journey towards organisation. Towards getting 'sorty'. I want to share my thoughts and my process along the way. (Assuming I come up with a process!) Show before and after photos. (Which is actually possible now since I found my camera after looking for it for two weeks). Possibly offer items that we don't need or have never used but are too good to just throw out. To share tales of woe with other disorganised souls. To get advice from people with more experience.
My hope is that this blog will show that if I can 'get sorty', then anyone can!