Fall cleaning

Traditionally I hear of people doing spring cleaning, but this past weekend I did some MAJOR fall cleaning. Our house had been becoming progressively more sloppy and I would just do the bare minimum to straighten everything up because, as the previous post indicates, I've been very busy lately. But this weekend was the first that I didn't have something really big going on and because Keegan has been working weekends (booo) I had a lot of time to do some deep cleaning. Just walking into our house I feel SO MUCH BETTER because I'm usually exhausted when I get home from work/lab/TAing and then walking into a house that was just completely disorganized and a bit grimy was really not all that relaxing. Plus I can see a big difference in how it looked before and just seeing the difference makes me feel accomplished.

I started out just by going through like 3 months of mail that had been piling up. I mean, we take care of the bills and everything right away (but now most of them are posted online anyway) but there was the random junk mail, credit card ads, and Crate and Barrel magazines (which are much more entertaining since I began looking at Catalog Living over the summer!). Once all of this was off of the floor/coffee table/end tables/kitchen table, I moved on to picking everything up off the floor so that I could then dust and vacuum everything.

The next big project was tackling the kitchen floor. This involved going out to buy a bucket to actually fill with water + floor cleaner to scrub the floor, on my hands and knees, being overcome with the smell of "cleanliness". This is the area where I can see the biggest difference because even though I sweep the floor regularly it really just needed to be scrubbed to be really clean. I also cleaned all the counters and the stove-top.

The bathroom floors and showers also needed to be scrubbed, so I did the same thing upstairs as I did in the kitchen, and then also cleaned the mirrors, sinks, faucets, and toilets. Woooo. I got a lot of other small things done this weekend too that had been nagging me. Like doing a load of towels (we were waiting until we had a bunch to wash instead of only a few) and cleaning my car. Buying Halloween candy, a pumpkin, and some chrysanthemums.

Lesson for next time: keep on top of your cleaning.