spring cleaning this autumn
September 7, 2009
Remember, oh, 4 months ago, when I said I’d be joining Simple Mom’s Spring Cleaning Party? Well, I finally got started. I guess in our household, it’s going to be more of an autumn cleaning party. Frankly, I think autumn’s a better time anyway. There’s a crispness in the air that gives me far more energy than the sunny warmth of spring. Spring is really like a sleeping pill for me. Also, there’s an excitement in the air related to the new school year and approaching holidays that seems to give me an extra bit of motivation to tackle big projects.
Anyway, we decided to skip Simple Mom’s “clean sweep,” since we’ve been doing such sweeps once every couple weeks for the past year or so. We’re always surveying our stuff, deciding what we could part with, and then either selling it immediately or storing it for future donating/selling. Simple Mom’s philosophy about spring cleaning is that it’s not about turning our homes into magazine spreads – it’s really about three basic steps that we apply thoroughly in the entire house once a year or so: decluttering, cleaning and organizing. It ultimately makes our homes more beautiful, more practical and more livable. We moved right on to the largest, most difficult room in our place: the living room. This is what Simple Mom says about this room:
Your living room is probably the most used space in your home.
Oh boy, is it ever! In our case, it also makes up nearly half the square footage of our entire apartment. It’s a very large room, and it holds a lot of furniture and a lot of stuff. It took Toffi and me the whole day to get this room up to snuff, and there are definitely some future projects waiting for us, but it was such an amazing feeling to have a truly clean, decluttered and organized living room when Marie got home from daycare. She’s only two, but even she noticed the difference!
Here’s just one example of many. The wide shot doesn’t really show how dirty the place was, but that’s probably a good thing. You can see how cluttered it was, and that’s really the key part. Marie was so amazed when she got home, that she insisted on helping me show you just how much nicer it looks now.
Before
After
