Artax's Blog: The Road Goes Ever On and On

[artax]

Wynken -- Thanks so much for your warm words of support. You're an encouragement to me, as well.

3/13/12

Only had time to minimally maintain my routine yesterday, as I had to meet with a client (and get paid! *cheer*), go to the print shop, and purchase some supplies for another project.

But you know what? It's SO much easier to keep something up if it's been kept up all week to begin with. Of course I'm familiar with the concept due to the FlyLady system, but for whatever reason it's finally sinking in that simple list routines really do work, even if you have to skip the major de-cluttering projects for the moment.

I think my problem is, when I first attempted to get on a routine, I felt it had to be a rigid schedule, like being the military. Weekly laundry had to be done on Monday, weekly kitchen cleaning on Tuesday, and so on. This worked great...for a while. Then eventually something would come up and I'd have to skip a day. That in turn meant the laundry didn't get done that week, because it wasn't the correct day. So two or even three weeks later, the system had broken down and I had a mountain of dirty clothes/linens, and when I finally confronted it I wore myself out because it took all day.

So my new mantras are:

1) Do it when it needs it.

2) Small but often.

Also, I've given myself amnesty that it's OK to not have a super full load of laundry or dishes every time I run the machines. If anything, they run more efficiently when not stuffed to capacity.

Well, I'm off to the Big City for the day to meet with another client. I'm actually looking forward to this weekend, as I'll have more time to make even more headway on the big messes.

Until then, I'll keep working at sticking to my maintenance routine.

[wynken]

Woot to you cos you are doing it.
Once upon a time I built up Flylady routines.
Then I got a bee in my bonnet
and over time
I lost it
again.
I haven't managed
to get them back
yet.
I need repeat to myself
decluttering, routines and maintainance
are not dirty words.
I keep getting hooked up
on my hangups.

[artax]

Hi Wynken --

You're right; they aren't dirty words -- they're clean words.

I'm only doing the morning routine that I've outlined earlier, and it's made such a tremendous difference. I think what happened the last time is that I tried too much, too quickly, by setting up morning, afternoon AND evening routines from the get-go and trying to implement them all at once.

Small but steady moves seems to be the way to go.


3/14/12

Oh, it's such a lovely spring day outside.

Normally I'd be spending it outside, as far away from my messy home as possible. No more!

First order of business: the oven. It's begun to actually smoke when I turn it on, which means that the layer of grease and debris has gotten to a dangerous fire-hazard level. Mr. Artax has the day off, and is helping me figure out how to get it to "self-clean" mode. I've only used this function perhaps a couple of times in the nearly ten years we've lived here. Basically, it involves getting the oven so hot that it burns everything inside into a manageable black carbon.

So after a rough clean-out of the larger sections of grime, we'll turn it on. We'll have every single door/window open in the house; hopefully in about 4-5 hours the gunk will come off. I just hope the resulting smoke doesn't set off all the alarms in the process.

We have the fire extinguisher at the ready, just in case...

[PaperGrace]

Someplace here there was a great tip about vacuuming out the oven after running the self cleaning cycle. I used a spatula to loosen the crud last week while I had the vacuum out and it was great, even without baking everything to a crisp! I hope you have fun with it, and that there are no flames! Be sure to celebrate by baking something! I used to have a bad habit of not using things once they were clean so I wouldn't mess them up!

[artax]

Hi PaperGrace --

Good tip about the vacuum! Thanks.

The fire alarm DID go off a couple of times, despite the fact that every window in the house was open.

You know your oven was pretty filthy when, after cleaning it, you realize that you can now actually see through the glass door...


3/15/12

I've been taking on the kitchen pantry/broom closet for the last few hours.

Soooo difficult! I despise throwing things out -- hence my problem -- and having to toss so much food is really bringing me down.

Now that I'm at a stopping point, I'm off to get some lunch and to purchase a broom/mop/duster holder gadget for the wall. (These are currently stored in the corner in a dark, tangled jumble) If I'm going to regularly maintain the floors, I need to make the process as streamlined and accessible as possible...

[artax]

3/16/12


Had a very difficult morning, due to an unexpected phone call from a childhood friend who is also facing struggles with maintaining their home -- much worse than mine. (As I said, creative types can be messy) Unfortunately, now the authorities have become involved and my friend is at wit's end. I hope to be as supportive as possible, while still keeping to my own path to recovery.

*sigh*

Well, I finished the pantry yesterday. It took hours and hours. The hardest part was when I had to toss out numerous packets of dried nori and kombu from Japan. I keep envisioning that I'm going to have all these people over for a traditional sushi dinner...but I have to be brutally honest with myself. It hasn't happened, and isn't likely to happen for some time.

I actually cried as I crumbled it all into the compost bin.

While I was out purchasing the broom holder gadget, I also got a small l-zy susan for the bottles of vinegar and cooking oil, so I'll have easier access when I'm cooking. I DO enjoy cooking, but the last few years have seen me doing so less and less. If my husband and I hadn't gotten on this de-cluttering kick and cleaned out the oven this week (which, as I mentioned before, was smoking dangerously) I fear that we would've just resigned ourselves to using the microwave instead.

On another battle front:

After the wrenching phone call, I pulled myself together and took on the tea shelves in one of the kitchen cabinets. Yes, I had more than one shelf for tea. Over the course of several years I had purchased more boxes and tins and bags of the stuff than any one person could drink in a year -- or several years. Tea, after all, can keep for ages if stored properly. Or so I told myself.

Just as before, I stood before the collection of cluttered items and asked myself why I was hanging on to them. The answer? Because I secretly still dreamed of having people over for tea, and to be able to present them with so many wonderful options that they wouldn't know which to choose from.

The reality is this: Even my closest friends aren't that much into tea. They're coffee drinkers. Mr. Artax drinks tea, but prefers the same variety every morning. The odds of someone else coming over, say, for a tour of my studio -- and let's just say for sake of argument that the house is presentable enough that they would come over -- the odds of them loving tea as much as I do is slim to nil.

A hard realization, that.

So box after box went out the door, stale tea leaves emptied into the compost bin like so much confetti. (Except for the ginger or citrus based blends -- those are beneficial microbe killers and went into the trash.)

I now have three empty shelves, and a couple of tins that contain fresh teas that I will consume over the next few weeks.



EDIT: Forgot that the word l*zy is censored on this forum. Is there another word to describe a l*zy susan?

[PaperGrace]

Turntable!

Great job letting go of old teas. I have a beautiful picnic basket that mine are stored in, that I cannot get to currently, rendering both the beauty of the basket and the variety of the teas useless. I'm putting that on my To Do list sometime this weekend.

[sidestep]

Congrats on tossing the tea & the sushi seaweed & freeing up your shelves. You can just adjust the spelling a bit & trick the filter for l-a-z-y susan.

Best wishes with your friend & I hope she can be helped by a website such as this when she is ready, able & open for self & home improvement.

[artax]

PaperGrace -- Turntable! Of course. Thanks. Let me know how it goes with the picnic basket.

Sidestep -- Thanks. I'll try the dash spelling trick from now on.

***

3/18/12

Mr. Artax, still inspired by my progress, has proceeded to clean the insides of all of the downstairs windows. They were so incredibly filthy, that he ended up vacuuming the dust-bunnies and cobwebs first, then wiped everything down with a damp rag, then wiped them yet again with Windex and paper towels. He proceeded next to take apart the blinds and wiped each slat down by hand. (They're the wooden, removable kind.)

While I am absolutely grateful for all this help, I am fighting this strange sense of angst and guilt and -- dare I say it -- resistance. For whatever reason I feel that things are getting too clean too quickly, and that makes me uncomfortable.

When your home is getting cleaner, you should feel better, not worse. I keep telling myself that it's just part of the process, and not try to over-analyze things. But I can't help but wonder if it's possibly related to all the moves I experienced as a child. (We moved every other year or so) Moving was about the only time my family attempted to clean windows, and was a time of great upheaval.

There are other external factors that might be triggering anxiety as well, so it's difficult to say for sure.

At any rate, I'm going to try to keep going and tackle the upstairs bathroom floor and several other areas today, making sure to get out for my daily walk where I can get some fresh air and sunshine to counteract the gloom.

[artax]

3/20/12

Spent some time with my friend whose home is about to be investigated by the health department. They said they are beyond embarrassment now -- just in a state of utter numbness.

I hadn't been over to their place in about a year and a half, and it had indeed gotten worse due to a perfect storm of events that culminated in a sudden medical emergency. 911 was called, and the fire department came; then the medics involved became alarmed at the situation and called in the police...and now my friend has had all the rooms in their home photographed/documented and is facing losses on several fronts.

I have agreed to help in any way I can, but the situation is quite overwhelming. At the support meeting I attended yesterday we learned more about what's going on, and how much of a threat the home was deemed to health and safety.

It was so sad. When I came home all I could think about was my dear friend's situation, and how insignificant my problems seem by comparison. Now I'm ten times more determined to never let my home deteriorate to the point that my rights would become violated due to the concerns of well-meaning strangers.

My friend is much tougher than I am emotionally; if this had happened at my house I think I'd have immediately gone go to pieces. That said, I don't know how much more of this they can take...

[artax]

3/22/12

Still trying to be supportive of my friend.

Still plugging away at my own messy home.

Spent a good amount of time moving some furniture around in preparation for carpet cleaning. I'm wondering if it's at a point where it just needs replacing instead of cleaning. A whole decade of undisturbed dirt and dust. You know it's bad when you finally take the time to clean up a set-in darkened area with spot remover, only to find that while that area is now bright and clean, the rest of the carpet now looks worse, as you can compare and see just how filthy it has become.

[PaperGrace]

I have been known to caution Husband when he's cleaning up a spill: "Don't make a clean spot!!"

[artax]

PaperGrace -- Heh, that sounds about right.

3/24/12


I think I had a very sobering moment yesterday when helping my friend de-clutter/clean their home.

I realized that I might be an enabler.

Due to their situation, my friend desperately needs to get rid of as much stuff as possible, and all I could do was say things like, "Maybe we shouldn't toss ALL of those (insert items) out." or, "Didn't your Dad make that?" or, "Oh, what a lovely teapot!" or, "Perhaps we should save all these board game pieces in case we find the box they belong to."

Seriously, I don't think I'm much help at all.

[PaperGrace]

Maybe you could offer to clean while/after friend declutters... be the elbow grease of the operation!

[artax]

Good idea, PaperGrace. Think I'll mention this next time I go over. Thanks.