One Week

The dining room table, and the floor around it, have been clean, devoid of clutter, crap, and cruft … for one whole week.

Now, that may not sound like much to most folks. But as I commented recently, Margie and I have been slowly losing to a slowly accumulating tide of Basic Messiness.

So now we have (and now that we’ve had it twice, I can say it) Wednesday Night Cleaning. We’ve divided up the house into twelve zones. Each Wednesday night, we spend two hours (only) working on one zone, in rotation. It’s not just a matter of picking up clutter, but of (a) delving into the seriously accumulated debris (stuff that’s been there for weeks, months, etc.), and (b) setting up systems that prevent clutter from occuring.

A week ago, we cleaned up the Living and Dining Rooms. A lot of it was putting away stuff on the dining room table, but it was also a matter of setting up a system, a process. There’s now a big plastic storage crate — the “down box” — sitting near the basement door. Stuff to go down to the basement goes into that box. When the down box is full — or when someone needs to go to the basement, and has a minute — then the box goes downstairs, and the stuff gets put away.

Nothing gets left on the table. Nothing gets left on the floor. Nothing gets put there “just for tonight, we’ll get it tomorrow.” When a piece of clutter needs to be put down, there’s either a defined staging area for it (the down box), or it gets put down where it belongs.

This may sound very commonsense to most folks, but to us it’s sort of like having Moses revealing the tablets: we knew it was what needed doing, but now that we’ve decided upon it and accepted it, we can do it.

It’s really neat seeing that empty dining room table when I come downstairs in the morning, or when friends come over. And I know it’s one less thing that will need cleaning when we are entertaining this weekend.

Last night the zone was the Family Room. Now, looking at the Family Room this morning, there’s still a lot of clutter and crud to pick up. But …

Margie tackled her desk. There is a substantial improvement in conditions as to what’s there. A lot of stuff got tossed, or taken back to the office, or otherwise filed away.

I tackled the window shelf, where CDs and DVDs and video tapes have been choking off the sunlight like kudzu. Now … there are two plants and our Lento Thermometer, and that’s … it.

All of Kitten’s kid videos are up on a shelf. The DVDs we’ve borrowed are up there, too, as are some discs I want to watch in the near term. Everything else is in the cabinets, or … in the down box. And the shelf will stay empty. There are places for everything that could go there, and that’s where those things will go.

(Yes, this is likely a sign that we have too many DVDs and tapes. That’s another project.)

Now, we won’t get back to the Family Room for another three months, at least not in this fashion. And there’s plenty to do when we do — more work at the desk, reorgnizing and culling the stuff on the shelves, and in the cabinets, etc.

But it’s a start. And it’s sustainable. And it’s got a plan. Baby steps, baby steps, baby steps. The trick to handling immense problems is to break them up into bite-sized chunks.

The dining room has been clean for a full week. I feel absurdly like someone announcing how long it’s been since they lit up a cigarette, or took a drink. But I take my successes where I can get them. And I think this is one of ours.