I feel a little embarrassed about the pictures I’m about to share. I’m doing it because I want to communicate how very little time it takes to make a huge difference in a room of my house…but that requires showing you the sloppy disarray of our dining room. We all have messes, I know…but we don’t all put them on our blogs, do we?
But because I love you, and I have a point to make, I’m doing it anyway…here is my messy, cluttered dining room:
If you look, you will see many things that don’t belong in dining rooms (Let’s play I Spy! Between these two pictures, can you find: a coat, 2 hats, 2 bags, a printer, a Japanese paper doll, a Catherineholm bowl and an electric razor…what the what? I don’t have answers, so don’t even bother asking how they got there.)
Now that you’ve seen the disaster that can happen after several days of living in a space and not picking up after yourself, let me show you what happened after I set a timer for 10 minutes and cleaned.
I’ll start by saying I really only used eight of the ten minutes. The last two minutes was spent looking at the room from different angles, straightening curtains and dealing with the curtain rod that fell to the floor during my cleaning frenzy.
In the 8 minutes of actual cleaning, I cleared all the surfaces, returned random stuff to the rooms where it belonged, wiped the table, swept the floor under the plant, closed drawers, straightened chairs and made neat piles of anything left over. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not perfect…but huge difference, right?
I bring up this topic because I personally have a huge barrier when it comes to cleaning. I look at a mess and think, this is going to take forever to get through. FOREVER. Forrrr….evvvv…..eerrrr. (I’m melodramatic, and I watched Sandlot a lot when I was a kid).
But the thing is, when you really get down to it, you can transform a room from something that embarrasses you to something you’re proud of, in as little as eight minutes. Even if it means you motivate yourself by setting a timer, just like you were a little kid. If it gets the job done, that’s what you should do. (And stop thinking about it, just do it. I don’t care if you don’t feel like it. You’ll be glad you did, when it’s over.)
P.S. Yes, that’s a flying pig above the windows. His name is Sonic (as in, the hedge hog, because he’s made out of fake leaves) and he lives there, permanently. It was Jon’s idea.
