Maintenance Mode at Keeping House With Kate

Friends, I have achieved (well, almost) the much-sought-after place we call Maintenance Mode.

What does that mean?

Find out about maintenance mode, my brand of crazy, and my system for maintaining my house with chronic illness (and a whole lot of boys) at my other blog, Keeping House With Kate.

The L Word, and a New Blog

Can we talk about laundry?

I have ISSUES with laundry. Picking up laundry baskets hurts. Carrying laundry baskets hurts (and my laundry room is not IN my house!!). Transferring from the washer to the dryer hurts. Getting things out of the dryer hurts. Also, I have OCD, and one of my issues is that, for some reason, I cannot put away laundry unless the floors are freshly cleaned (I know. I am weird. Huzzah for neurosis!).

Read more at my other blog, Keeping House With Kate

Week 1 - Organized Home Challenge - Countertops and Sinks - Part 1

So, I am starting the 52 Weeks to an Organized Home challenge from Home Storage Solutions 101 as part of my series "Keeping House with Kate". Also, as part of my personal challenge in this series, I am currently getting the house back into "maintenance mode" so I can resume my "room a day" cleaning schedule and my basic daily to-do list.

This month for the flylady habit of the month: Shining your sink, and, ostensibly, keeping it that way.

And this week's Organized Home Challenge is "all about kitchen organization, both overall and with specific emphasis on keeping your countertops and sink clear and clean."

I've been pretty open about my OCD. But here's the tricky thing. When you hear "housekeeping" and "OCD" together, you may get this idea that my house is ALWAYS PERFECT, because I can't stand when it's not, right? That's the common misconception. Let me clear that up for you.

Ummmmmmmmmmmmm........

Well, I am not a slob in the strictest sense of the word. I do tend to spend a lot of time tidying up and deep cleaning things. But I really like REALLY DEEP CLEANING. I can't be bothered with the minutiae of daily chores. Those are for normal people. Also, I get sick kind of a lot, and I get distracted even more.

So what we end up with isn't pretty. At all.

WHAT A NIGHTMARE!
Especially if you have OCD
And like a tidy home
and....... are......... human?!

This is just painful.

Really, truly painful. From the hallway, my kitchen looks like this:

So, let's follow some steps here.

First, the planning, according to the Organized Home Challenge.

1. Think about the function of your kitchen.

Okay. My kitchen is used for cooking, storing food, eating, socializing, homework time, family calendar planning, "launch pad" area if you follow Flylady or "family control center" if you follow Home Storage Solutions 101, and it's also the place where stuff gets dropped off when we come in the house through the patio door (which is our main door.) and where the dogs drink their water (but not eat their food). It's the first room you see if you're coming in through the back door, which most people do, since my driveway is on the back of my house. It's ALSO the place where we take vitamins and incidental medications, and since cold/flu remedies and antipyretics (big, fancy word for "stuff that reduces fevers), it's pretty reasonable to keep the thermometers in there.

You should make a list like this. We're probably going to refer to it often, since as we organize our kitchens, we need to either make space for each of these functions or figure out moving some of them to other areas of the house. If you're with me on this, don't sweat. I'm not. We've got time.

If OCD Girl isn't stressing the details, you shouldn't either.

2. Create Useable Counter Space And Clear Your Kitchen Table (Mostly)

Kitchen table? Oh you mean THAT kitchen table.....

Pardon me while I remember how to breathe.

Usable counter space I can manage. But the table?! I am guessing they don't meant to clear off the kitchen table by shoving everything into a box either, huh?

No?

Are you feeling a little overwhelmed? I am feeling a good bit overwhelmed right now. So, back to basics with me.

To start, I did the dishes. Then, because I am a SUPERGENIUS who started this while dinner cooked, I did dishes AGAIN! Dishes, like laundry, are the NEVERENDING CHORE. I do the dishes then have a cup of tea. It feels good. AND THE CUP AND KETTLE ARE NOW DIRTY DISHES! CURSE YOU PERRY THE PLATYPUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then it got cold. REALLY COLD. Like MINUS FIVE cold. And even with trickling water through the pipes, they froze. That's pretty awesome. And by awesome, I mean, HORRIBLE. See, there was a leak OUTSIDE........

Maintenance came to de-ice the pipes and put a heater in the laundry room to keep them from freezing again. Hot water and pressure restored, they headed out to the next property.

And the heater blew out my power.
So I sat in the dark for 24 hours.
And it got cold again.
And the pipes froze.

So, I was without running water for eleven days, and that is why this post is officially a BEFORE post. I will finish up the cleaning and organizing of my counters and sinks hopefully today, and then you will get an "after" post!


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Keeping House With Kate - New Year's Day Edition

I need a cool picture for these posts. Anybody want to hook me up? I am USELESS at that sort of thing. A cool picture and a cute li'l badge would be so neat. I'd feel like a real, live BLOGGER! Ah, well. For now, you get to look at me in the kitchen. Isn't that a pretty kitchen? Yeah... It's not mine.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year.

It's 2014. Or I think it is. There are fireworks EVERYWHERE. My dogs are not pleased. All three are crated, and the older two are nice and sedated, but still panicking a wee bit.

I've been asked to do some more blogging, and I apologize for the length of my absences. I've had a lot of stress and anxiety, and I guess something about the transparency of blogging scares me just a bit. I am working on that. But it's a new year, and I guess, a new "start" so to speak for my inner blogger.

So, let's start the year off like everybody else, okay? The dreaded New Year's Resolution post. Year after year, I've said that I don't make New Year's Resolutions. They don't work. People don't stick them out. But what I WILL do is accept some challenges and make some goals.

Challenge 1: 52 Week Money Challenge
Looks simple, sounds hard. Starting this week, you save a dollar. Then each week, you save one dollar more than the previous week. At the end of the year, you should have $1378 in savings. Since I am broke as a joke and have no actual bank account, I have an American Express Bluebird for this project. For all other things, I use my PayPal card or my AccountNow card.

Challenge 2: 52 Weeks to an Organized Home
I love how simple this is. It's brilliant! I think it spends two full months just on the kitchen, but you don't do the whole room in a day. I can handle that. Even my OCD can handle that.

Challenge 3: Attack of the Flylady
So, this one I am sharing with another friend who has specifically asked me to blog about it as I go. So, I've mentioned before that I fail at the flylady thing with my OCD, right? So, after further investigation in 2013, I've realized that I just can't with flylady. The control journal makes me crazy, and the daily routine lists leave me obsessing for weeks, and I just CAN'T. It's absolutely not a failing of her system. It's a failing of my therapy, or lack thereof, and my complete lack of coping skills. It's cool. I have my own way of coping. See? I have a routine for the most part, and it's not that far from OR that close to Marla's. I can't get dressed to lace-up shoes every morning. It hurts. Plus, I'd like to keep my orthotics intact as long as possible, because those things COST! So, Flylady, I can't do the whole program without working myself into a complete neurotic breakdown. What I CAN do, though, is focus on the daily missions (linked above), and work on the HOM (Habit of the Month). And I can keep up with my own system of checking off the daily chart and moderately-deep-cleaning a room a day, but super-cleaning a zone at a time the flylady way sounds like a great way to keep it manageable. My dear Natacha wants me to blog these challenges as I go, daily for a while. I will tag them "keeping house with Kate."

Challenge 4: NaBloPoYEAR
Because I have utterly abandoned my blog within three days of starting any other NaBloPoMo endeavor. Yep. I'm going to try it every month this year. I am actually going to use the writing prompts, which means, no themed NaBloPoMo posts on weekends.

Challenge 5: Read the Orthodox Study Bible in a Year
Because I always abandon this idea pretty quick too. Not this time. Y'all keep me on top of it, okay??

So, that's it. My OCD is begging me to find a fitness challenge (there are a million of them out there), but I JUST got health coverage again for the first time in two years, and I want to get the doctor's opinion before I start anything major. Also, with my healthcare plan I can get a free membership at Gold's Gym, and I REALLY like that idea. The local one has a women's only facility. No hot tub though. I may have to see if I can find a local gym with a hot tub that my plan will cover. The big goal with this though, well, really, covers both the fitness thing AND the I-finally-have-health-coverage-and-can-see-a-doctor-after-33-straight-days-with-the-same-migraine thing: getting my health in order as much as I can and regaining some of the quality of life that I have been desperately missing recently.