HTCI Update

This is extremely embarrassing, but here goes nothing. Welcome to Step #5 - Gather Tools and Document Evidence.

For this step, I had to let my house go for 2 days in order to see where things end up in piles and such. This was really difficult for me, but it had to be done and so I did it. For 2 days, I watched as piles accumulated and my house turned into a complete disaster. Wow. I had no idea how quickly we create piles and how often they land in so many places!

So, without further ado, my documentation:

When you walk into our front door, this is what you see

After walking through the entryway, you end up in our living room

Then, you walk up the stairs to the next level (gotta love split levels!). To the right, is our kitchen:

On the other side of our kitchen, is our playroom/office/supposed to be a formal dining room:

*I cannot believe I am putting these out for the world to see*

Next, you climb the big set of stairs:

This lands you in the upstairs, the first door on the left is the guest/Emma's bathroom:

Keep on going and the next door on the left is our Master Bedroom:

Master Bath and walk-in closet are in this room as well

After this, looking straight ahead in the hallway is our hall linen closet:

To the right of this, is the guest bedroom/craft room:

Next, is the nursery but I could not take pictures in there because Emma was sleeping... suffice it to say that the nursery is clean so did not really need to be pictured anyway... 

After this, we head all the way down to the basement:

Looks dangerous doesn't it? It is. It's a disaster. Anyway, moving on... we head down into the basement into our rec room:

To the right of the finished portion of the basement is the unfinished portion with the laundry room and crawl space:

Next, we'll hit the last place in our house that you could possibly store all of your junk... the garage:

That concludes our disgusting and hoard-ish house tour. I can't believe what I saw when I took all of these pictures. In our defense, we are trying to clean out the basement and garage and have had a lot of work being done in these areas, despite the picture evidence to the contrary. Everything is in complete disarray and it's awful! I'm sick to my stomach just looking at all of this! How will I ever get this organized??? ugh...

HTCI Update

Today, I actually made progress on my House That Cleans Itself project, and all I have to say is:  WOW

Why? Because I did not realize just how messy, dis-organized and cluttered my home is. What an over abundance of stuff we have been blessed with. When looking at the house as I did my prayer walk and took pictures, I was struck by how much stuff we have and how much God has blessed us in our time in this house. I was struck by my laziness and my lack of willingness to do anything about the clutter and the mess. There have been improvements but man! this house is in need of some serious purging and re-organizing and cleaning.

HTCI Step 4:  Put God at the Center

This step was made up of completing a prayer walk through the house. I started in the basement and made my way up to the bedrooms, taking a grand tour of my own home and taking stock of everything in it. I stopped on the main floor and stood in the center of the play room and prayed for every room on the main floor where we do almost all of our "living". Since we own a split level house, I could cover almost every room. I need to do another more thorough prayer walk but I have decided that as we continue room by room with the next steps, that I will commit to praying while I am working on that room.

It is amazing how many things I was able to praise God for and it also amazed me how shameful I felt for not just having so much stuff (there is nothing Biblically wrong with owning things), but for having so much stuff that we do not use or have never used and have no need of. What a shameful waste of resources, God's money, and space in our home. Now, granted... much of what we have in the toy room was all gifted to Emma so I am not counting that room. We have been fortunate with Emma in that we have only purchased her a few (literally, less than 5) toys and most of that has come from thrift stores. We are SO blessed by the people that God has placed in our lives. Everything else, is our own failure. Purchases made with good intentions most of the time, but things that are just piling up because we are unwilling to part with them.

Today, in my Bible Study group, we were challenged with the thought that if everyone and everything in our life was taken away and we were left completely alone and without our things, would God be enough?

This prayer walk really helped me to see that although, in my heart, I believe that God is enough... I am not portraying that in my daily life and in my home.

Lord willing, I will have a long life with my beloved family and friends... but today I realized that I need to get to a point where God is enough.

Next step:  Gather Tools and Document Evidence.  Stay tuned because you are going to be flabbergasted by the photos that I took today. It may take a day or two to stir up the courage to actually post them on here!

The Truth: The House has not cleaned itself

The truth is that I had to return my HTCI book back to the library.
The truth is that I purchased the book for my Amazon Kindle for PC and have it available to me.
The truth is that I have not finished, or even started, the prayer walk and the next step.

However!

The truth is that the first couple of steps gave me so much inspiration that I have begun to clean out and organize our home a LOT over the past few weeks. I am hoping to jump back into the book and finish it out the way it is supposed to be done, but it has not happened yet.

I am loving being a stay at home mom, but it is so challenging to make sure that I do not fall into a trap of laziness and disregard for my new position within my home. I love all things internet. I love discovering new websites, new blogs, new deal sites, new ways to shop and save. I love emailing, I love catching up on all of my friends and family on facebook. I spend far too much time on the computer and this has creeped into my day with Emma. I am finding that I am not nearly as engaged as I would like to be and need to be.

I am finding myself more and more challenged these days to be the person that I should be. In the past two months, we have passed the 3 and 4 year mark since our mom's lost their battles with Lymphoma and a brain tumor/esophogeal cancer. Sometimes it only takes a thought during the day to remember that life is very short and that we are here for a moment. I need to make my moments count and I need Emma to know that I spent every moment I could with her while I had moments on this earth and while she still was willing to spend time with me :)

My life is in need of a major overhaul... the domestic life is much more challenging than the ins and outs of a career life outside of the home. Time for change. Serious Change.

The House That Cleans Itself - Part 1 & 2

So, as my previous post mentioned, I have been reading the book The House That Cleans Itself. It has produced a lot of change in our house, so I decided to blog my progress as it happens.

Step 1 in the book is to draw a floor plan and determine flow pattern of our home.

I happened upon a website that allows you to lay out the floor plan of your home and fell in love with it. I had so much fun drawing up the floor plan of our home, inside and outside. It really gave me a sense of just how much God has entrusted us with. We have been in our home for 7 years now and it hasn't been until this point that I have really started to look at this house as our home, and not just the place where we sleep and wait for our next house. This is big for me! It made a huge difference in how I view my home.

The website for the floor plan is: floorplanner.com   It took me over a week to finish the floor plans due to many interruptions by a very curious 16-month old and a husband that required a lot of computer time over the last few weeks... but I did it! I printed off two copies of them as the book suggested and set about determining our flow plan. Below is the result:

Step 2 - Decide on your base zone

Step 2 asks us to choose a base zone... one zone in our house that when it is completely clean it makes our whole life better and when it's dirty, it makes me feel irritated or stressed. I asked Chris what he thought this room would be for him. We had different answers! For me, it was the kitchen. If my kitchen is clean, I feel like the whole house is clean. For Chris, it was our master bedroom.. if our bedroom is clean, he sleeps better and feels like he is in the most comfortable and relaxing spot in the house.

Once I chose our base zones (I was kind of hoping they would be the same one... so much for that!), she asks us to purge and clean that zone. For me, this is still a work in progress but I have at least managed to complete this task in our bedroom... it took an entire week of sorting through every single thing in our closet, moving clothes out, putting summer clothes in, re-arranging our hanging clothes, cleaning the bathroom from top to bottom, making the bed EVERY morning, vacuuming as often as possible, washing the dog bed, cleaning the walls, changing the light bulbs... I purged and cleaned like a mad woman. I have also started this in the kitchen but it is a much more difficult and tedious process as we have a lot of things stuffed into a very small space.

I forgot to take before pictures of the bedroom and kitchen... I will do this after Step 3 since she asks us to let things go for 2-3 days without cleaning anything ... that should be fun.

The next step is a prayer walk through the house... I am very interested to see what that's all about!  I will say that this has inspired me a LOT to keep things clean ... I am really enjoying this so far and it has really caused me to see just how blessed we are!