Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Cleaning up!

Let me start this post by asking you to guess how many hours k-man slept in a row last night. 5! yay! woohoo! Now, ask me how many of those I slept for. That's right, none :P I have a horrible habit of not going to bed early enough, then not being able to fall asleep when I do try to sleep, and being horribly horribly out of it and overtired in the morning. I need to stop that. I'm a night person by nature, so it's hard. Why can't Kiernan just follow MY schedule?? ;)

But back to the original topic of this post. I'm not a tidy person. I have never been a tidy person. On top of not being tidy, I am a packrat. I keep everything. Everything is precious and nothing needs to leave my possession. I have married someone like me. This has made our 3 bedroom semi-detached feel VERY small for a family of 3, and K isn't even walking yet!!!

Now that I'm home on maternity leave I thought I would be better about keeping things tidy. I'm not. I'm worse. I'm tired, I'm busy taking care of Kiernan and when I have down time I just want to blog or read other blogs, or go on facebook. In other words, I want to escape and not clean because I was just working changing diapers and trying to get a baby to nap and running up and down the stairs. And I'm cooking a lot more, so that's work. And maybe I'm just a bit lazy and don't get bothered enough about the clutter (unless people are coming over)

So, we're doing something. We're hiring a cleaning lady. Once we find one :P First we got disqualified by the one person we were able to find that actually cleans house for someone we know - our upright vacuum cleaner did it, she wasn't afraid of our house or anything like that. Then this weekend we went online and asked for a bunch of quotes from people and companies. Amazingly, only one company got back to us. What's up with that?! Anyhow, they are coming this morning to give us a quote, hopefully it will be within the budget we've allotted and they can start soon.

Despite getting a cleaning lady, I am also starting to schedule myself regular tasks. On monday I am going to endeavour to empty all the laundry baskets of clean clothing by putting the stuff away (crazy!), on Tuesday I am going to do a load of laundry (Eric has been primarily in charge of laundry for awhile now and I was so bad that I only learned how to use the washing machine we got when K was born 2 weeks ago!) and on Thursdays I am going to empty the diaper champ because a full week of poopy diapers in it makes K's room smell bad. I know it doesn't sound like much, but by scheduling these things into my calendar I'm hoping to get off my lazy ass and do them, on top of the other daily things I listed.

We really need to get on it too, because K isn't going to staying in one spot for much longer. He is already rolling around and can easily move 5-8 feet from where we put him. And I got a bit of a wake up call yesterday when my friend's 11 month old daughter proved to me that moving everything off the floor and onto coffee tables is not sufficient, she can reach those! bah! ;)

While we're at the whole cleaning up thing, we're moving forward on having our bathroom redone. Next Tuesday our rep from Distinctive Bathrooms is coming over to measure because we are getting their tub special and will have a fancy new tub with fancy new fixtures and fancy new wall tiling, hopefully by the end of May. Yay to no longer having to shower in a tub that looks filthy no matter now much you scrub (so why bother scrubbing ;) Hopefully we'll get the rest of the bathroom done (we're doing that part ourselves) by the end of the spring or summer.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good Good and Good.

Anonymous said...

That was a half-assed comment. Sorry about that.
Okay... cool about the cleaning lady. I know it has been on your wishlist for a while.
Awesome about the bathroom. I completely understand the lack of appeal to bathe in a dingy tub, AND I also can sympathize with the not wanting to clean a room which will NEVER look clean anyways.

Danielle Bennett said...

Sorry about Danielle not working out, I feel really crappy for you on that score!
If the quote doesn't work out, there have been some signs posted on telephone polls in my neighborhood about cleaning services, i could copy the number if you want.
P.S. I have been fighting my pack-rat gene (somewhat successfully) for my entire life. JD helps with my progress.
PPS. I also hate cleaning. It just seems so pointless, since stuff will only get dirty again : )

Lara said...

I, on the other hand, have chosen to embrace my pack-ratty-ness :) All of these things WILL come in useful again. I swear :)

I'm feeling pretty good about the quote we got yesterday. Just need to check some references now.

Unknown said...

You said the cleaning company was comign to give you a quote.
Was their quote something like this? :

"Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!"

Anonymous said...

As a former HUGE slob (I recall an incident when Josey was crawling in which a box of crackers spilled on the floor in our old den - they stayed there for at least a week) the scheduling tasks thing really worked for me. On top of getting more organized about it the more kids I have (how's that for logic), doing a small group of chores every day (laundry, tidying the floors, etc) I do a room or area every day, taking the weekends off. At first I totally overscheduled myself (who really vacuums the couch every week?), but once I figured out a system I actually started enjoying it. When things start out relatively clean, they're way easier and more fun (yes) to keep clean. I surprised myself with the realization that cleaning the bathrooms are my favourite, as long as I don't let them get nasty. As for the bathroom reno, that will definitely help. I hated cleaning the old bathroom at our last house because nothing could make it look good, but as soon as we redid it, it was my favourite. Then we moved here and into crappy bathrooms again, but whatever... Anyway, I'd clean your house if I lived in town ;)

Lara said...

oooh, move to town, move to town! :)