Spring Cleaning Anyone?

The bug has hit me.  You know the one….spring cleaning, or call it post-wedding-cleanup, or possibly “I can’t take this messy house anymore!” syndrome.  Whatever you call it, it hit me hard last week.

It was great timing too because all of my older kids were gone to the Christian Worldview Film Festival Thursday-Saturday, so it was only my younger two boys with me at home.  They don’t get as much done on their own as the older kids, but they do work hard (ish) and I was looking forward to being able to just tell them to do something without it having to be a discussion.

Here’s a little rabbit trail about having older kids at home.  They’re wonderful and amazing, but not as helpful as you think because they have their own schedules, which is great and what you want, but as far as house cleaning goes it’s hard to find a groove.  Plus I can’t say to an older kid, “We are going to move some furniture to make room for ____,” unless I want to have a whole discussion involving their opinions and ideas, which I generally don’t.

Anyway, I was looking forward to the weekend with my little guys (not so little really at 9 & 14).  On Friday I decided to just spend time together doing fun things and leave the work until Saturday.  So we did origami and played some games and went for a drive with the windows rolled down.  We sat outside and talked about their current obsessions.  We had a nice, relaxing day.  I did say a few times, “Y’all be ready, ‘cuz tomorrow is going to be a work day.”  They smiled, but I knew they weren’t ready for what was about to happen.

We got up early on Saturday ready to go.  My plan was to organize all of the wedding things that we had dumped in the guest house living room a month before.  We literally got home from the wedding and emptied all of the cars into the guest house and closed the door behind us.  The only thing I did do right away was wash all of the tablecloths.  Then we dumped them over there too.

The guest house used to operate as kind of a bed & breakfast.  We had a constant stream of company in our little one bedroom cottage.  But then our oldest son moved into the bedroom out there and I turned the living room into a workshop.  It was sewing, crafting, etc for our etsy shop (which we closed a couple of years ago).  Then last summer we found we had a leak under the bathroom floor when it caved in one day and so my son moved out of there and into the main house and we tore out the whole bathroom and kitchen (which also got ruined from the leak).  Those two rooms now are nothing but gaping holes.

Then it became wedding storage.

But I am ready to get in there and rebuild the bathroom and kitchen, so the wedding stuff had to get taken care of.  And that’s what we did on Saturday.  It’s all still out there (next project is to make a large space in the storage building for the wedding things), but it’s neatly in boxes and organized and labeled.  We left the front door open while we worked so we could enjoy the weather and we diffused peppermint to keep the energy up.  It was actually kind of fun, just the three of us.

We didn’t rush, we talked and relaxed.  We had snacks and worked together and I think the boys will remember it as a fun time.  I kept telling myself to stay chill and it would get done.

That got me itching to do a few other jobs that we have been slacking on.  So later that afternoon we straightened a drawer here and put away a pile there.  I re-0rganized my essential oils and set up a workspace for myself to make videos.  I’ve been planning a spot where I can do some tutorials about how I made the wedding things and some essential oil ideas.  And now I have it all set up and ready to go.

Getting these things done feels like a weight has been lifted.

Don’t you love getting something done that really only takes 20 minutes but you put it off and put if off?  I have a hundred of those jobs.  Getting 3-4 of the taken care of last weekend gives me hope that we might get the rest done too.  Someday.  Maybe.

Sunday was pretty quiet here.  The older kids were all worn out from late nights and long days at the festival so they slept most of the afternoon.  We had a family dinner and caught up on everyone’s plans for the week, then they all went back to bed.

Poor kids.  Just wait ’til you have babies.

I have let everyone know that we will be doing similar jobs next Saturday, so don’t make any plans.  If you want to get together with friends, feel free to invite them to our house and tell them to bring work gloves and a sack lunch.  Mama’s on a roll.

Hope over to Facebook and tell me what jobs you’re itching to get done!