Being Good People

That is our goal for the first quarter of 2011.

Basically, we’ve sucked at being good people for the last almost 7 months, since our wedding (or really, since we got engaged). By “being good people,” I mean keeping our house clean, exercising regularly, and just generally being organized adults.

I often feel like this:

{Cartoon source from one of my all time fav blogs, Hyperbole and a Half. I so want a t-shirt with this on it! And this mug too, while I'm at it.}

I used to be so good at organization. I used to lay out my outfits a month at a time, and plan out our meals before every grocery shopping trip. When we started working on wedding stuff nonstop (did you see yesterday’s post? The wedding was our life for 9 months before the first half of 2010 too!), we just didn’t have time for much else, and basic things like vacuuming and cooking fell to the wayside, especially considering I have to waste an hour and a half of everyday sitting in my car, commuting.

And we haven’t gotten back in the groove of doing these normal things, even almost 7 months after our wedding. Which I've realized is because it's an ugly, never ending cycle. We can't be productive if things aren't in order--and things can't get in order unless we're being productive.

But no more! We’ve set some goals for ourselves, and are going to stick to them for the next three months (I don’t like calling our goals resolutions, because it seems then they’ll be destined to fail).

How we’re going to be good people:

* Set a timer and both spend 15 minutes doing nothing but cleaning at least 3x a week, to take care of the day-to-day maintenance cleaning (I have to admit, this is not my idea, I believe it came from one of my wedding date twins, Mrs. Snow)

* Work out, hike, or get some kind of exercise at least 3x a week

* De-clutter our lives, spending at least a couple hours each weekend deep cleaning/organizing

That last one is going to be tough, but it’s a must-do. Part of our messy house problem is we really have way too much stuff. And I’m lazy. I tend to leave something out of place, telling myself I’ll pick it up later, but there’s still shoes near our front door that I kicked off 2 months ago. And probably 4 months of junk mail piled up on our pool table.

So if we don’t need it, or haven’t used it in the past couple of years, we’re just going to be tossing it or donating it. We need to do this for our entire house, since right now we live in about 2,000 square feet….and whatever size of house we live in, I will fill. So you can imagine how much stuff we have, and it will be impossible if we ever need to downsize to a smaller house (after all, we’re spending way too much on rent right now).

We started the de-cluttering Sunday night, with me cleaning our kitchen and throwing away old mismatched silverware, and only keeping the nice hand-me-down silver and our new set of stainless that we received as a wedding gift. I know we won’t miss our plastic handled spoons that we still had from our college dorm days!

And my husband got rid of a whole garbage bag full of clothes. It was sort of cute, actually. He was cleaning our bedroom while I cleaned the kitchen, and he came out and asked me what he should do with the giant pile of clothes on the floor. I was sure a lot of them probably didn’t fit anymore, or hadn’t been worn in a long time, so I suggested he go through them and see what he could donate. Apparently this was a new concept for him, because he needed my help getting rid of clothes! Not only did we find stuff from college, and maybe even high school (that so didn’t fit now!). He had never, ever gotten rid of clothes himself before. So we went through it all, and had a little fashion show to see what fit, and it was a good start at de-cluttering our bedroom. I think next weekend I need to do that with my own clothes as well, since it’s been about 4 years since I’ve cleaned out my closet. Now THAT will be a project….my closet bedroom right now consists of several giant piles of clothes, an even bigger pile of shoes, my half unpacked suitcase from Christmas, and a narrow trail from the door to my ironing board.

(This was my closet bedroom last spring. It's worse now because I borrowed my 3 garment racks for our wedding, and have yet to start using them again. I think this is part of the problem, we have so much space that we're able to dedicate a whole room to my clothes and shoes, so I abuse it and let a year of, "Oh, I'll just pick that up later" pile up!)

Yes, I think the closet bedroom (and the 3rd bedroom closet, which is half full of my clothes too) is a good place to start with my own de-cluttering. Let's just think of those above pictures as the "before" photos, alright? I probably have at least 4 bags of clothes that can go. But I will not give up a single pair of shoes! Ok, ok, maybe the pairs that have a heel snapped off or coming loose…. (I swear I’m not a hoarder. I’m just generally too lazy to walk the broken shoes out to the kitchen to throw them away!)

How do you keep your house clean and clutter-free? Does anyone else struggle with this, or are we the only cleaning-fail newlyweds out there?