Get Your Shit Together: The Laundry Room

Okay, Day 2 of my 10 Day challenge to get my shit together in this house. I’ve got some momentum going from tackling the mudroom and figured I should take on the biggest problem area in the downstairs living space next…

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That’s… stuff.

Clearly I don’t do well with horizontal surfaces and “clutter.” The long-term plan for this room is to get rid of the shelf, put in two floor to ceiling cabinets/built-ins to hold cleaning equipment and other storage, and then a legit counter and some shelves over the W/D. Also, the pink tile… again.

The short-term plan was to make this a slightly less horrifying place to walk by on a regular basis.

Originally I thought I could get this done in one 20/10. After tackling the mudroom, I realized that this would probably take two. I got my trusted supplies ready– basket for items that go in other room, bag for trash, and the bottle of wine my dude so thoughtfully brought over because he heard I’d be doing more cleaning– and… GO  TIME.

One 20/10 later, here we are:

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For being a room whose primary function is cleaning things and housing cleaning supplies, it was… not so clean in there.

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However, I will give myself props for labeling these faucet parts whenever I threw them in the cabinet a couple of years ago. Would never, ever have known what the hell they went to otherwise.

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See? I’m not always an organizational nightmare.

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I stocked up on “extra supplies” (mostly bleach… we use a lot of bleach on the farm) because one of the things I wanted to do while organizing was get better about being prepared in general. It would be great to only have to shop for these kind of daily-use supplies a few times per year instead of constantly running out, and then forgetting to pick them up at the store every day for a month. It’s a vicious cycle.

As always, the holy-shit-that’s-a-lot-of-progress moment happened just as the buzzer rang to end my second 20/10…

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I mean… this was yesterday morning…

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And now…

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That’s… pretty unreal. I don’t think the room has been this clean since I moved in. The best part about this is that I’m doing it between 9-11 at night, which means it’s not eating in to my day, and I don’t have to sacrifice a chuck of “project time” on the weekends.

Up next? Both bathrooms and the linen closet. I’m on a roll!

19 Responses

  1. Good lord that’s sort of incredible! And if I’m reading correctly….only took 40 minutes of effort? I’m currently hating my own laundry room, as it’s taken on storing a ton of homeless stuff from our basement remodel. This before/after has me ITCHING to throw it all away….but I fear I will regret it if/when the other room is finally finished and everything that goes back in there is in the dump. 🙂

    1. You’re reading that right! 40 minutes of effort, with a 10 minute break in there to drink wine with my bearded dude and talk about how awesome I am at organizing, apparently. (If I can do it, anyone can.)

  2. I’m seeing lots of empty space above the washer and dryer. Freecycle some old kitchen cabinets so that you can hide more shit up there!

  3. I took off a day of work tomorrow and my plan is tackle the house! I am excited at a whole entire day with the house to myself to clean! (My BF will be at work and his kids with their mom.) I am going to blast the music and clean and organize to my heart’s content!

    You are doing a great job! Thanks for the motivation!

  4. There is one awesome tip I want to share with all of you. It counts for about anything you need regularly. Like medication, bleach lol, food, cleaning supplies etc.
    Buy 2 of them. The moment you empty the first put it on your list and make sure you have a new one before the other one is empty.
    It works for me =D

  5. Wow, is there a housecleaning equivalent to food porn? I love seeing the before/round1/round2 progression. I am so into this.

    Personally, I am of the “oh no, my parents are coming to visit in a week and now I need to take a day off work so I have an entire long weekend to do nothing but clean” school of housecleaning. Yes, the very thing that the Unfuckyourhabitat site says creates housecleaning burnout and is unsustainable. And they are so right.

    I dunno, it’s pretty inspiring, another few days of this and I may have to try the 20/10 plan…

    1. We finished the one part of the porch and now the 17 day countdown until company comes has begun. And it is ALL cleaning! Three days would never do it at this point!

  6. Amazing! I STILL have not started, but maybe tomorrow … .

    I did finish the porch pillar and jack the roof back down with no injuries. Then it was time for a G&T!

    Can’t wait to see how tomorrow goes Kit!

  7. YAY!!!!! go you!! That’s incredible!! only 40 minutes?

    I was home for a total of an hour last night and did a 20/10 in my kitchen. I forgot to take a before picture as a record but what a great feeling afterwards!! Thank you for the motivation. My fiancee, my house, and my sanity thanks you!!

  8. I have a system for maintenance cleaning that I developed because I am much the same about cleaning A.D.D. I would take one thing to another room and then start cleaning there until something else took me to another room… until the entire house was torn to heck and I was left feeling so overwhelmed that I would give up half-way through and everything was worse than when I started.

    My epiphany moment came when I realized that I spent more time traveling from room to room than cleaning. I started just dumping everything that didn’t belong out the door to the room, and then when I was done with the room, taking all the stuff and putting it away with the rule that I didn’t linger as I did it.

    Now I have the house separated by days…
    Monday is bathrooms and watering plants / fish tanks.
    Tuesday is the office and spare bedroom.
    Wednesday is the hallway, utility room, and cat litter box.
    Thursday is the living-room, loft, and master bedroom.
    Friday is the kitchen and dining-room.
    Saturday is outdoor or car projects.
    Sunday is House improvement projects and cat litter box.

    The rule is… it doesn’t have to be perfect, I just have to make SOME progress on the room that day.

    I even have a year long check list on the fridge to remind me, and even though it makes me feel like a kid with a list of chores, it also makes me feel good when I see that list fill up with check-marks week after week.

    The hardest part is still doing a little work on the list item if I have been working my butt off all day on another project.

  9. Finally checked out the 20/12 thing, and gave it a whirl. Got a boat load of things done today, as a result. Thanks for the inspiration!

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