Home of the Flies

Tags

cleaning, flies, house cleaning, pests

We have house flies.

IN WINTER.

They started a little while ago. We noticed one or two around the house, usually in the bathroom or computer room. We suspected that they were after the poo – there was a dirty disposable or two in the bathroom garbage in the cupboard under the sink, and the cat litter box was due to be changed.

On boxing day, it seemed like there was more than ever. That morning we discovered that Beloved Dog had had diarrhea in his crate, no doubt as a thank you for the canned turkey with cranberries dog food I gave him on Christmas Day.

Perfect Husband spent a gruelling half hour cleaning out that crate, and came downstairs a changed and disgusted man. Then I washed the dog’s ass while waving away flies and we made a vow.

Boxing Day would be the Day Of No More Poop.

With Owl potty trained, we no longer have a bin of cloth diapers in his room. I put the last bag out for our diaper service a couple of weeks ago. We still put him in a disposable over night, but that’s it, and he usually doesn’t poop over night.

There was no reason to keep poop in our house.

So I not only cleaned the cat box, I scrubbed it.

We emptied all the garbage.

I swept and mopped the downstairs, and vacuumed the upstairs.

I covered the bathroom and large portions of the kitchen in Comet.

By the end of the day, we could say with pride that our house did not have a single crumb of poo in it.

“Mommy, my POOPED IN THE POTTY!”

…Okay, so we flushed that and THEN our house did not have a crumb of poo in it.

But yesterday, it seemed like there were possibly even more flies.

This morning I was sure of it. I walked into the computer room and found a cloud of TEN OF THE THINGS, just dancing away.

WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?

Getting Older – THE ORGANIZED WAY

Tags

ageing, cleaning, hoarding, Ikea, organizing, tidying, turning 30

Well, if you have to turn 30, this weekend was definitely the way to do it.

I got to sleep in, and then PH fed me breakfast. He then produced two awesome gifts – A 9 bin shelving set for organizing the toys in Owl’s room (because the pile-everything-in-a-heap method wasn’t really working) and METAMAUS, which is a book ALL ABOUT THE WRITING OF MAUS.

Is that nerdtacular or what??

So I read Metamaus until Owl’s nap time, and then we started cleaning.

Expired/Unused product from my bathroom filled HALF A GARBAGE BAG

In the afternoon my friends arrived and they helped me go through my coat closet, my shoe rack, and (most dauntingly) Owl’s bedroom closet.

You could say that Owl helped, too... if by "helped" you meant "picked things out of the garbage and placed them on the Farm Fairy's baby's head".

I packed away stuff he has outgrown, agreed to donate certain things that I don’t mind re-obtaining for my next child, and clapped with glee as his impossible-to-open closet became a tidy, well-sorted space that my child could enter safely without, oh, say, a COFFEE TABLE falling on his head.

You think I'm joking about the coffee table, but I'm not. Trust me, this is much better.

THANK YOU, PERFECT HUSBAND. This works so much better than the jumbled floor heap.

Oh, and the red chair

Which we offered up for free on Craigslist TWICE

Moby

Still enormous

and the awkwardly large coffee table

Though it did match the floors beautifully

were removed from my living room, which now actually has several contiguous feet of open space for the first time in years.

We can even fit people into the living room, now!

Then we went out for a steak dinner.

SO GOOD.

So, in the last week we have removed 18 garbage bags’ worth of stuff from our house, destined for either the dump or Value Village.

A small sampling of our refuse

Owl’s room is so tidy it looks almost barren, but the walls are not – the cross stitches that I have been storing for a shamefully long time are finally in their rightful places.

and while there is still work to be done in the bedroom and general organization needs to happen on our bookshelves, I feel quite pleased with the results.

On Sunday we went to Ikea to use the gift cards that my friends happened to give me (which I’m sure was an excellent coincidence has nothing to do with PH winking and nodding at my friends when I exclaimed in glee over their good choices).

Now we have small, moveable tables for the living room (much better for a small space) and Owl finally has his own chair.

I feel almost like a grownup.

Almost.

Us: 1 House: 0

Tags

cleaning, dehoarding, organization

The first step in the very long list of messes to be eradicated has been completed.

BEHOLD OUR LINEN CLOSET:

IT'S SO TIDY

BEHOLD WHAT WAS THROWN AWAY/DUMPED AT VALUE VILLAGE:

to PH's disappointment, I decided against donating the cat.

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Now we just need to repeat this with every room and closet in the house.

…

…

Fun.

In Which Carol Contemplates Turning 30 And Makes A Desperate Plea For Help

Tags

age, birthdays, cleaning, organization, turning 30

I am nearly thirty years old.

That’s WEIRD.

30 has never been a scary age for me. 20 freaked me out, because I always thought of myself as child-like and 20 was a decidedly ADULT age. But once I had hit that ominous level of adulthood, 30 just seemed like a minor transition.

It helps that I feel like my life is somewhat on track. At this age I hoped to be married with a child, and I am. I hoped to be a dog trainer, and I have not only trained service dogs, but have just started my OWN DOG TRAINING BUSINESS.

But I’m still leaving my 20s, and there are some things I haven’t done.

Some people make a “30 things to do before 30” list. I didn’t do that, mostly because I:

a) couldn’t think of 30 things

b) never got around to it

c) knew that I wouldn’t be able to achieve them, anyway

I would have included items such as “become a published author” and “find a hair style that doesn’t make me look fat or like I have no ears” and it’s hard to achieve the near-impossible within a limited time frame.

So then I thought I’d do a “30 posts til 30” thing, where I reflect on various aspects of my twenties, getting older, etc… but that would have had to start on Dec 30th.

But I DID make posts on those days, so maybe it still counts?

Anyway, today is a combination of New Year’s Resolution/Nearly 30 post.

I decided what I wanted for my 30th birthday. 

A CLEAN HOUSE.

And I don’t mean just a newly-scrubbed house. We’ve done that before. It just gets dirty again.

Our big problem is that we have a small house and a lot of STUFF. We also have very few ways of organizing that stuff. Hence our entire house has basically turned into a disorganized heap, with tunnels cut through it for us to be able to pass from one mess to another.

I may have some slight hoarding tendencies.

I also have difficulty with making somewhere LOOK clean. I understand the concept of CLEANING. I rub it until the dirt comes off. I can CLEAN.

But I can’t seem to make things LOOK clean.

Meanwhile, there are some people who walk into a room, rearrange a few things, and presto! The place looks immaculate. I watch and gape and am like “SHOW ME YOUR SECRETS.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a teachable skill. When I ask people how they did their magic they just say things like “I moved some stuff”. I posted the question on message boards and got useless answers like “make it part of your routine to do certain things daily”.

So the only answer I can think of is to just get rid of the stuff that’s making my place messy.

Really, what I need are shelves and storage containers (we have limited floor space but a lot of unused wall space and a big storage area under the stairs), but we’re tapped out for money right now. My work has now cut me down to 17 hours a week, which doesn’t even really cover daycare. I’m the ONLY one with cut hours, too.

That’s so good for my self esteem.

ANYHOO,

I need to declutter and organize.

What better time to purge my life of old things but the time before my transition to age 30? Like a butterfly crawling from a cocoon I will shed the detritus of my 20s and emerge as a totally new and tidy self.

Or something.

The only thing is that this is a completely impossible and overwhelming task to contemplate, so I will have to enlist some help from friends.

I hope there’s somewhere out there who wants to go through my old clothes with me. Preferably one of those magic poof-it’s-clean folk.

If any of you have organization tips, now would be a great time to share them.