I Need to Clean But I Don’t Want To! – Day 1

Let’s get right into the nitty gritty on day one, shall we? We live in a fast paced, buy now and pay later kind of world. That lends itself to our thought patterns on many things including cleaning.

If we’re honest, some of us love check lists and cleaning plans because they allow us to skip or procrastinate certain tasks. (Tweetable) However, let me point out that if you only clean your counters, do your dishes, and vacuum once a month then you are going to have problems. Problems of the health and safety variety. Stay away from any writings or dialogue that tells you it is okay to do that. You will retrain your brain to think once a month is normal and your family and your home will suffer for it. We won’t even mention how burnt out you’ll be. Besides, would you allow your child to sleep over at a friend’s house if you knew they only cleaned certain things once a month? I didn’t think so.

We need to just wake up and face the fact that we are going to spend more than 20-30 minutes a day cleaning.(Tweetable)  If you learn to think ahead you can do less and less because by planning and prepping (which will become second nature to you and take mere seconds) you will cut the time it takes to do certain chores.

Let’s consider the internal dialogue:

Scene: You are cooking as well as multi-tasking other things.

“I’ll just put this big pot to the side and rinse it later with all of the others. I need to get this done first so that it is ready on time.” (phone rings)

Four minutes later you are behind on checking the buns in the oven and now have to scrape off the edges so your kids will eat it. By the time you are done you have to set the table and sit the kids down to eat. After dinner you spend a few minutes catching up with the hubby and by the time you realize it, the pan you left unrinsed on the counter will now require the equivalent of a blowtorch to remove the stuck on goo.

At this point you resign the pot to dish purgatory where it will sit for a day or two until you are mentally ready to tackle it.

Did I paint an accurate picture?

I think all too often many of our tasks end up this way. Those of us with the “I’ll do it when I have the time to do them all and do them right” mentality usually end up spending hours fixing something that would have taken only minutes had we done just a little bit of prep work and forethinking.

That particular scene would have been less dramatic for mom had she simply stuck the pot in the sink and started running the water. That would have required the little bit of forethought to not fill the sink completely with dishes while cooking. Instead, she could stick those dishes on the counter instead of the pot. Does that make sense?

I hope so. I also hope you are on board with this. We need to retrain our brain, get off our bums, and make a house a home! You with me?

To read the other posts in this series: 31 Days to a Clean, Fresh Nest.

For more blogger’s participating in the “31 Days” series visit Nesting Place.