Cleaning the House After An Illness: Day Two of 'The Plan'

Day two looked a lot like day one, to be honest.  

I got out of bed.

I made the bed.

I got dressed (with shoes).

Then, I looked at my bedside table and the floor next to my bed.  I checked for dirty clothes, trash, and anything that didn't belong there.  Yes, I found a few things, but instead of taking me 10-15 minutes like it did yesterday, it took me about a minute tops.  And, since I got them all out yesterday I knew where everything went away at.

This means I had time and energy to continue on.  After my bedside area, the first thing you come to is my dresser.  This means there was another surface that had been an easy dumping ground while I was sick.  So, my goal for the day was to pick up the dresser and area in front of it.

I closed all the dresser drawers and put away the clothes on top of it that would fit into the dresser.  A few items were things that needed to be hung up, so I hung them up.  I took things out that didn't belong in my bedroom, and threw out any trash.  

After doing this, I had a number of clothing items that were supposed to be in my dresser, but wouldn't fit.  I had 2 reasons for this.  One, I was in between sizes since I was 20 weeks pregnant.  The other was that it was warm when I got sick and had turned cold while I was sick.  This meant there were 2 seasons of clothing trying to share the same space.

While I was still NOT decluttering, I did go ahead and pull anything from the pile that I knew I absolutely wasn't going to wear until the next year.  Those items I put on the bottom of my closet (where I could close the door on clutter) and the other items remained stacked (folded) on top of my dresser.  

I also removed the load of laundry from the drier (from yesterday) and put a new load of laundry in the wash.  Yesterday's laundry did not get folded.  It was just in a basket.

Now, you may wonder why I didn't just go ahead and take the items out of my dresser that weren't working.  The fact is, that I didn't really have anywhere to put them.  There were a couple of items on top of the dresser, but a lot more in the dresser that needed to be put away (in storage).  And, I knew this.  

If I had started going through the drawers, this would have created the need for extra projects.  I would have had to find a bin to put the clothes I was keeping in.  I would have had to decided what I was doing with things I didn't want or need anymore.  I would have had to figure out where to PUT the things I was donating/selling/etc.  

There is nothing wrong with doing the things I just said, in fact it's usually good to do these things as you go about cleaning, but when you are recovering from and illness, and doing housework for only the 2nd day in 2 months, it is not the time to start large projects.  I had to let myself start with the minimums and work up to the bigger projects.  Remember, there was still stuff laying on the floor of my bedroom.  Getting those picked up was more important then sorting through all my off season clothing.  I had to learn to prioritize in order to get the house back on a limited amount of energy.

That was the end of my second day of work.  It was probably about 20 minutes start to finish.  I tried to keep my work time to about that at first.  But, after just 2 days I had a nice, clear, path to my bed and it was noticeable (at least to me) that I done something.  I knew I was off to a good start.

I am going to continue blogging my progress-possibly daily-for awhile.  So, I hope I don't bore those of you who are already healthy and have a clean house too much.  I will still blog about our school, so don't worry.  I just really wanted to document this because I know I am not the first person to be sick for a long period of time and have a house to reclaim.  I'm also not completely done.  Once I get done telling you how I got started, I'll fast forward to real time, and it would be nice to have some accountability for what I'm doing now :).

God Bless,
Lisa