Got to do something
That believe it or not is my bedroom, the space between my bed and wardrobe and you know what’s even worse? The day before I took the photo (I took the photo yesterday) I had spent the entire morning clearing that area and it was clear! I have to do something and maybe putting that photo above on the net will prompt me to do it, I think I need to ‘shudder’ go back to Flylady.
I have a mixed relationship with Flylady; I know that (in theory at least) her house management system works, I’ve tried it twice and each time for ooh about a month I’ve had a reasonably tidy house but it’s so regimented it really isn’t me but maybe I need to make it me. I think (from experience) the trick with Flylady is to read the many many e-mails that come flooding into your inbox on a daily basis as, the term they use, it ‘Flywashes’ you and I know where I failed both times I tried Flylady before, I stopped reading the e-mails, but they are so saccharine (and repeat a lot) I can’t bring myself to read them for more than a month. I think I need the ‘Gordon Ramsay’ method of Flylady “Sink – Shine – Done”, instead of having to plough through many many paragraphs on how shining my sink will make me and seemingly every housewife across America feel so much better.
Even though I haven’t been practicing Flylady for a while now I do still often wonder what Flylady would think of my flat, for example what would she think about the space between my bed and the wardrobe? Now I know the mantra, which seems to me pretty much to chuck out everything (declutter) but looking at the photo above, I need all that stuff! Ok the cookbook on the bottom right hand corner should have been in the bookshelf but there’s clutter in front of the bookshelves and I can’t reach it, the two large soft toys in the photo are the kids but they live in our room because there’s no room in the kid’s room and although we do occasionally try and get rid of them (the soft toys not the kids!) they notice immediately and have to be rescued from the bin bag (and my argument is that if my kids notice the toys are gone, they are obviously still using them and therefore it would actually be a bit mean to throw them away because they don’t fit in), the basket on the bottom left hand corner is actually a ‘Flylady thing’ I still do, one of her methods of tidying up is to tidy up with three containers, one for rubbish, one for recycling / giving to charity shop and the other for putting stuff in that should be elsewhere, the basket in the photo is the latter, my kids call it the lost basket. Beneath the cookbook are my boxes of books, I sell books (along with reading them voraciously) and I need to keep my boxes of stock somewhere and the only place is honestly my bedroom. The rest of the stuff in the photo is generally clothes because there’s so much in front of my wardrobe I can’t get into it! As I said I cleared the area completely the day before I took that photo, how did it get so bad again, so quickly? Well I think I read somewhere on Flylady about things acting as a nuclei for other mess and my stock boxes in this case are the nuclei, I’ve nowhere else to put them though (honestly, I live in a really small flat), they block the wardrobe, voila!
Just the speed that particular area reclutters has made me realise that I spend most of my life now fighting this flat, I have better things I’d like to be doing other than constantly clearing that space and all the other hotspots around my flat; I’d like to read more, write more, craft more, cook more, spend more time with my kids. We do not have any money to move anywhere bigger but I believe strongly that I have within me the ability to earn enough money on a self-employed basis to one day earn enough money so that we can move BUT that’s not going to happen if I spend all my time firefighting this flat. So tonight I think I’m going to have to ‘shine that sink’ but as for the e-mails I still can’t bring myself to read them (I never cancelled my subscription, currently they get automatically diverted to a folder which then gets deleted unread every now and then), maybe I need to use my writing skills and write myself a set of instructions to read every day Gordon Ramsay stylie!
When you find the Gordon Ramsay version of Flylady can you let me know. I’m trying to revamp my whole Flylady system myself…without the purple puddles…that term alone has driven me away. LOL