Kitchen or the Egg

Today I realized that it takes more time to really clean, organize, and put things away than it does to stuff things in a closet or spare room.

I imagine many people already know this, and I may have known it too, but I didn’t really understand it when I set aside an hour to straighten up my downstairs before guests arrived. About 15 minutes in, I figured out that it wasn’t enough time. I don’t know how much time I needed, but it was definitely more than one hour. With about five minutes to go until their arrival, I freaked out and threw a bunch of stuff in the closet.

I’m trying to change some of these habits and rhythms to better support a clean, comfortable home environment. But it’s a little daunting. How much should I actually clean before someone comes over? How long should I spend on it? How different should the house look from normal to guest- or client-level?

One thing I realized as I vacuumed was that I often don’t tidy up something, in the name of “doing it perfectly later.” If there’s a corner of messy toys or books in the family room, I seem to think, “I can’t really do it justice right now. I’ll fix it later and really do it right.” That later never comes, and the pile grows. Somehow, I think that doing a small thing right then doesn’t make a difference. Well, I keep running into the fact that I don’t have these endless blocks of time to do this work. It’s now or never! So the piles add up, especially upstairs with the laundry, and then the job is REALLY impossible to tackle.

I will say that progress is being made. But it feels slow. Steady? Not sure. Maybe.

Will this ever be something I don’t think about? Will I ever take it less seriously?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.