Week 6: the shower and its curtain
20 Feb 2011 2 Comments
in Weekly Update Tags: clean, cleaning, goal, housekeeping, routine, shower, shower curtain
I’m torn on whether I should call this a good week or not. There were 2 days that I got everything completed on my lists, which up to this point hasn’t been done before, and one of those days I got it all done before dinner. :) But there were also a couple of days that I barely got anything done. Here are the details:
Add 2 more tasks from Weekly Chores list each day (4/day total)- I’m starting to get into some stuff that hasn’t been done in a very long time. One of those: clean the shower. I’m a little embarrassed to show you these before pictures, but this is what my journey is all about. From now on my shower should always look like the after pictures here.
Before
After
Before
After
My shower curtain liner was even worse. Here are the before pictures:
I was very tempted to throw this out and buy a new one, but I decided to try and clean it first. I threw it in the wash with 2 towels, some detergent, and 1/2 cup of baking soda. I set the washing machine to the largest load and hottest temperature. After it ran through the cycle, I did an extra rinse and added a cup of vinegar. When it was finished, I was prepared to take out the towels and wash it once more with bleach, but to my surprise it was pretty clean. In fact it looked so good that I realized that it was actually quite a bit dirtier to start with than I originally thought. Here are the after pictures:
Sign up at tutor.com- this one has been put on hold. I’m still studying my calculus and as soon as I complete the book, I will sign up.
Begin selling clutter- uh-oh. This task fell on those couple of days that I didn’t get much done on my lists. But I’ll add it to next week’s tasks.
Your challenge for this week
Find one thing in your house that desperately needs cleaning and clean it. This shouldn’t be a room or an area that needs organization, but something that needs a scrub brush and a little elbow grease. Then come back here and tell me what is you cleaned and any other details about the project.
6 Months to a New Mann
16 Jan 2011 1 Comment
in Weekly Update Tags: budget, children, christianity, clean, family, Goals, home, housekeeping, mommy, mother, motivation, New Year, organize, time management, wife
Ahhh!!! Its been almost a month and a half since my last post. Sorry guys. If all goes as planned, this won’t happen again. I’ve set some goals for the new year and one of them is to write at least one new blog post each week, starting now.
And that leads into the topic of this post… my new year’s goals. If you have been following my blog, you know that I made a list of goals that I wanted to accomplish before Kennedy was born. Kennedy was born, and the goals were not accomplished. I got off track, but now I’m back at it!
The Christmas season is over and life is back to normal, whatever that means. Instead of setting New Year’s Resolutions (which generally come without a plan and thus fail) I made New Year’s Goals. The first week of January was spent writing down my goals and mapping out how I was going to achieve them. When I started, I thought I was going to spend the whole year working on them, but as I mapped it out, I think it can be done in 6 months. Woo-hoo! It won’t be easy by any means, and I hope that I’m not being too ambitious.
Most of these goals are the same ones I had before, but now they are written differently, with more specifics and with the smaller tasks needed to achieve them. Click here (or on the “My Goals” tab up top) to see what I came up with. You can also click here to see how I’m going to reach my goals.
If you are taking this journey with me (as opposed to reading from the sidelines, which is okay too), then my challenge to you is to…
1. Sit down with pen and paper and write out your goals
2. Break your goals down into smaller achievable tasks
3. Make a week by week plan on how you are going to achieve your goals
4. Answer these questions: what will you do if you get behind? get ahead? who will keep you accountable? what’s your plan if you get discouraged?
I’m going to try to add a new post every Saturday, so stay tuned. Topics to be discussed in the coming weeks: my new Household Management Notebook and how you can have one too AND week #2 (this was week #1 by the way).
Women’s Retreat
09 Nov 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: christianity, clean, comfort, control, family, goal, God, home, housekeeping, idol, idolatry, wife
Effectiveness of the New Plan
I have been working on my daily chore planner that I mentioned in my last post. While I haven’t managed to get all the tasks for a single day completed in that day, I do feel good about using this strategy. It has given me direction and helped me to break things down into something a little more manageable. As I continue working through the daily to-do’s, it should get easier and less time-consuming.
The Women’s Retreat
This past weekend I went on a women’s retreat with my church. It was a refreshing time of fellowship with God and Godly women. We talked about being intimate with God and the session that spoke to me the most was about idolatry. An idol isn’t necessarily a “golden calf” but anything that comes before your relationship with God.
We talked about 2 types of idols in our lives: surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are more obvious to us and those around us while source idols are the root from which surface idols come from. Here is a link that briefly describes each if you want to read a little more about this. And this link has the chart we used to describe source idols in more detail.
I learned that my source idol is comfort. Which means that I seek freedom and a lack of stress at the cost of productivity. This is why my house is constantly a mess and I tend to procrastinate on everything.
Now here is the part that was intriguing to me and kind of confusing. Because I want to improve certain areas of my life, I see myself allowing the idol of control to replace my idol of comfort. In order to let go of my need for freedom and a lack of stress, I start seeking self-discipline and standards. I fear that I will only have worth if I can get mastery over my life in the area of my home.
While my goals and dreams are worthy and even founded in scripture, I am an idolatrous if I allow them to become more important than the relationship with my heavenly Father. As I discussed this revelation with the speaker at the retreat she affirmed that you have to find balance in life (for instance, between desiring comfort and control) in order to remove the idols that will destroy your intimacy with God. She suggested that I start each day asking God what he wants me to get accomplished with my time. By doing this simple task, I am keeping my focus on God and not my own desires.
I have started adding this prayer into my plan and I already feel more at peace as I go about my day.
Lack of Motivation
20 May 2010 2 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: clean, family, goal, home, housekeeping, husband, motivation, organize
I am sooo sorry that I haven’t posted anything in a while. We have been out of town for the last week and didn’t have good internet connections. I apologize.
In my last post I mentioned that we had to reschedule with an insurance agent because I was too embarrassed to let him see my house and the mess inside it. The new appointment was set for Thursday morning of last week. I had a very difficult time leaving my plan of action (deep cleaning and organizing one room at a time) to straighten up the entire house. While I probably had plenty of time to make the house at least presentable, I wasn’t able to motivate myself to get much done.
The stress of cleaning added with a busy schedule (organizing a group of teenagers to cook and prepare a baked potato bar for about 80 people on Wednesday, plus 3 appointments on Thursday and packing for a week-long vacation), led to a few heated discussions in the Mann household. The house was still a mess when the insurance agent arrived and I thought I might die. In the end though, he didn’t even come inside the house.
Now that we are back at home from our trip, I have seemed to have lost my momentum. I would like to start cleaning right where I left off, but I’m noticing the messes that have appeared in areas I’ve already worked on. I also know that if I don’t unpack our suitcases today, they might not get unpacked until I need them for the next trip. I’m also looking at the clock. It’s almost 4 in the afternoon already and I haven’t done much of anything today. Matt will be home soon and I tend to drop everything when he comes home so that we can have some family time before the baby goes to bed.
In order to get back on track, I’ve decided that my goal for the rest of today is to unpack and get the living room back to the state it was before all the interruptions. This doesn’t seem too daunting and I’m hoping it will help me get motivated so I can start working on my list again tomorrow. Wish me luck!
Here’s the Weekend Update
10 May 2010 4 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: christianity, clean, confession, family, goal, God, home, housekeeping, mother, organize
Well, I haven’t been doing so great on goal #1 since my last post. I have not had a quiet time 3 out of the past 4 days. I had decided to spend at least 15 minutes every night before bed reading my Bible and praying, but lately I’ve been staying up so late that I’ve been too tired. I’m going to try and go to bed earlier this week, but if I don’t get better at having my quiet times, then I will have to find a new time slot to have them.
As for goal #2, I’ve done alright. Friday was a good day and I got a lot accomplished, but Saturday and Sunday ended up being family days so I didn’t work on the house at all.
Friday, I cleaned all of Kaylynn’s big toys like her Jumperoo and Laugh ‘n Learn Playhouse. I hadn’t let her play in the Jumperoo for probably a month because of the amount of dust that had collected on it. After I cleaned it, she was so happy to play in it again that she stayed in it for an hour. That gave me time to dust and clean our entertainment center.
Two things I learned about Murphy’s Concentrated Oil Soap…
1.) I really love how it smells, but maybe that’s just because I’m pregnant; and
2.) you should always keep the lid on it. It is a concentrated soap and the label says “pure vegetable oil.” These two factors, make it very difficult to clean a large spill off the carpet.
Confession of the week: our insurance company will not insure our home anymore because we do not have central heating and air. An agent from another insurance company was suppose to inspect our house this morning and then give us a quote to be insured by them.
Here is the confession: I had my husband call and say that “something came up” because I couldn’t stand the thought of someone walking through my messy home. Yikes! Please tell me I’m not the only one who has ever done this. This blog is a safe place; let’s hear your confessions.
