Friday, September 26, 2008

Oh, Table! I never thought I'd see you again!

I don't know about you, but my house is not constantly company-ready. I clean when I know someone is coming. If you were supposed to come over at 5:00 and popped in at 4:45 instead, you'd find me frantically vacuuming up cracker crumbs and pitching dishes into the dishwasher at warp speed. I've tried to commit to FlyLady but I just keep falling off the wagon! Anyway, at Cheryl's request, here is my biggest mess:


In case you can't tell, this is my dining room. I know it looks crazy, but let me explain. I love to make things, but it's hard to find the time. I generally only work on a project for a few minutes before I have to get back to caring for Suzi. I figured, what's the point of cleaning this stuff up just to pull it back out again in a day or two?

Therefore, this one table was covered with tulle for tutus, flannel for pads, cotton fabric for slings, t-shirts to tie-dye, and a bunch of odd stuff like laundry and clutter which hadn't quite reached its destination. When I started to work on a project it was aggravating because there wasn't a square inch of table that wasn't covered.

Luckily, I got motivated to clean it up after watching an episode of Clean House. I love Miss Niecy. I set the timer for 15 or 20 minutes at the time (a FlyLady thing) and focused all my energy on it. I organized each project into its own grocery bag or neat stack, and now I can just pull one out at the time. It'll be so much easier to work now! Here's the time lapse:


I feel like there should be fireworks going off, or a parade or something.

4 comments:

Cheryl Lage said...

Oh I am SOOOO proud of you! (and inspired by you!) I've been so fixated on all our "piles" as late...need to just attack it and get it done.

Impressive, impressive!

Have a great weekened!

Kristin said...

Wow! What a transformation. Feels good to get things clean, doesn't it? (This is coming from a woman with serious nesting urges right now!)

Anonymous said...

Great job Jenny! I like to watch Clean House, too, it's funny to see what some people keep.

Emily said...

I had a super awesome idea! I was talking to one of my coworkers (military guy) and he was talking about how he and his wife were having a baby. They are actually seeing a midwife in Macon. Anyways, he was saying that he would be much happier if he could find some slings that were more masculine-looking, maybe camo? So I got to thinking....i wonder how many military dads would like camo-print slings? There are tons of new-parent classes on base, and it would be the perfect opportunity to pass them out. What a great way to get dads (particularly masculine dads) involved! Long story short, when I get back from this deployment, I would love for you to teach me how to make slings on my sewing machine. I feel a new community service project coming on....