Bitten By The Spring Bug

I don't know about anyone else but I've been bitten by the "spring bug" and I've thrown open the windows to let the fresh air blow through the house. As a kid I used to laugh when I'd hear someone talk about doing their spring cleaning but I am long since over that because over the years I've come to appreciate the meaning of those words. You want to get in there and clean every nook and cranny, to  get out all the stale smells that accumulated in  your home from being closed up all winter long. The sun is shining and you want to open all the curtains and let it shine into your home,  the warm glow it creates as the beams of light come streaming across your freshly polished floor.

Many people go through an entire redecorating phase at this time of the year. Some will think about painting, be it one room or the entire house. Others will be adding light colored slipcovers to furniture, changing out throw pillows, getting out the light weight curtains and adding spring colored spreads to their beds.

Spring is a the beginning of life anew; be it the start of new grass and flowers growing, to that of the birth of farm animals, the return of the robins or domestic animals looking for a mate. We emerge from winter, wanting to shed all the extra layers of clothing and the heaviness of multiple blankets and comforters on our beds that kept us warm for the past few months. Spring is wanting to go out and dig in the dirt or run through mud puddles after a rainstorm and the clean fresh smells that the rain brought with it.

It is a good time to be cleaning out your closets and drawers, to give things to a charity, offer them to some one in need or have a garage sale and earn a few extra bucks.Now you can reorganize those closets and cabinets with ease.

I am so anxious to get busy with a paint brush it isn't funny. I have a large bookcase shelf unit that needs some repair work first and then a fresh coat of paint. Then I am bringing it indoors, putting it in my laundry room to become my pantry shelves. After that is done, I need to put a fresh coat of paint on the little country bench that sits on my front porch. 

What projects are you going to tackle?

Laundry Room Woes

Okay, today let's hit the laundry room, another one of those dreaded rooms we hate to tackle. That's okay, we almost have all the hard stuff out of the way! Hopefully this should take you no more than an hour tops to get straightened up.

Let's check the inside of the washer first thing. Is there a soap buildup residue where you put your soap in? This is common for those of you who use powdered detergent. Let's get this out of there. Next, lets check and see what the inside of the tub drum looks like. If you have cats and/or dogs, it is quite possible that you are going to find their hair along the agitator blades (top loader) or the ridges (front loader) and around the door opening of your washer. Wipe all this out with a damp rag.

Go grab a load of laundry to do while we tend to the rest of the work to be done. Got that load started? Good, now lets just wipe down the outside of the washer with either that spray bottle filled with white vinegar and water, or a mild soap solution.

My laundry room tends to be a catch all for everything! One of these days I hope to be able to build a lot of shelves and a counter top in here since it is a large room. I would love to make the upper cabinets as my food pantry and storage place for large items like my crockpots, the huge soup pot, punch bowl (which I seldom use) the various sizes of flower vases that I keep for arrangements around the house.

In the meantime, I do have some shelving units out there, that need some straightening up. There are usually some tools left out that I need to put back into my tool chest. Oh yeah, I do have one of those and I get laughed at when I am asked what I would like for Christmas or my birthday or Mother's Day and I usually will respond with " I could use a new Phillips screwdriver or a few containers filled with different sizes of nails."

Do you have a slew of those plastic bags that you carry your groceries home in? I have some, not as many as I used to because I am changing over to the "green grocery" cloth bags. I use these bags inside my small trash cans throughout the house to keep the insides of the can clean. I corral all of them by sticking them inside a large paper bag grocery sack. If you get more than that sack full, throw them away or better yet, return them to your grocer because many of them have a recycle bin in their stores. So much better really than having them go into the landfills.

Sweep and mop the floor and you are done and so should be that load of laundry you threw in to do!

Now you can take a quick tour through the house and do any general pick up that needs to be done, run the vacuum cleaner if need be, do a quick mop up of the kitchen floor and bathroom floor (since you already have mop water made up) and make the bed if you forgot to do that.

Our week is half over and by now the house should be coming into pretty organized shape. Once it is, the maintaining it will be easy. We will go into some deep cleaning projects to start on shortly, but right now, my main objective was to get you started on just making things more organized and looking better in general.

We women often feel overwhelmed by all that we have to do. There are many of you who work outside the home, I used to so I know exactly how you can feel like you don't have time to do anything but barely hang on and maintain at times.

So please, do what you can and what you feel comfortable with. Don't feel like you have to be superwoman and 100% perfect all the time in your home. My mom's favorite saying was that a house needed to be messy enough to look lived in. The joy and happiness that you bring to your family by just being Mom and being there for them is not measured by having everything in it's place all the time.