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!