samson

how my septembird turned out :'v

i tried to challenge myself w/front-facing, but couldn't find good refs for some of them
still had fun & enjoyed the low-commitment format~

gender non-confronting (i do not wish to think about it)

preface: This is an idea that (I think) was first presented by The Fly Lady. Unfortunately, she has gone into the Qanon zone, but the concept is pretty simple and lots of other cleaning/organizing bloggers talk about this as well. I don't want to seem like I'm "recommending" her. I do have some criticisms of her system, but there are also a lot of things she does that work well for me.

Okay, onward
I now feel like I have enough control of the major cleaning and organizing problems our household was having that I feel I can break down into more specializing cleaning and cleaning specific areas instead of just "holy shit this whole house is one continuous mess 😬" I also feel confident in my daily and weekly cleaning tasks now that most of them I do without even thinking.

The way zone cleaning works is you break up your household into 5 major "zones" and each week of the month you work on different zones. This also means that some months you may not have a lot of time to work on a zone, but that's okay. You aren't supposed to have to do every single possible cleaning task in a zone each month. Just break down what needs to be done that month. You also set your first and fifth zones to be areas that aren't as big or don't need as much cleaning.

I mostly followed the suggested routine, but mine is
Zone #1 Front entrance and Dining Room
Zone #2 Kitchen and Cabinets
Zone #3 Bathroom and Pantry
Zone #4 Bedrooms
Zone #5 Living room

So that means I am starting on my entrance and dining room first. Our house doesn't really have any sort of fancy entryway. Like most peoples houses that I have been into you just enter their front door and you are right in their living room? But I know some houses have an enclosed patio or nice storage and closets by the door lol. We have a less than 5 foot section where we hang jackets and keep shoes. So cleaning that area shouldn't take long at all!
My mom helped me organize the dishware in the dining room last month and showed me what we should and shouldn't keep (Most of these are her items after all. She is fairly reasonable about decluttering and we got rid of a lot of duplicates we had and now there is extra spaces in the china cabinet if we need it).
Today I started in the dining room with putting away my knit scarves that we just kinda draped around in the dining room because they had no better place to be. When I cleaned out unused clothing in my dresser it left an empty drawer that I now keep all my knitwear in. Then I went through our cookbooks. I unfortunately still had a lot of diet books, but it made decluttering them easy. I tossed all the diet books and suddenly I had half the books I used to. Next I moved onto dusting off and decluttering the knick knack shelves. All this took me less than an hour and I'm already through almost 1/3rd of the tasks for the week! Stevie is going to help me with some of the more cleaning focused tasks on her days off this week.

I have a feeling the first few months of the zone cleaning are going to be a little heavier, esp when it comes to the kitchen and pantry. Those areas still need a bit of decluttering and reorganizing. However I can see this being a very manageable thing.
I do like how it was emphasized that you don't need to get every task done in an area each month and if there is something you missed, you can revisit it next month. One of my biggest stressors when it came to getting into a cleaning routine was "There is so much to clean and as a disabled person I wildly have fluctuating energy and motivation". Reading so many cleaning people remind me that any cleaning is a blessing to myself and my household, even when not done 'perfectly' really helped me reframe my state of mind. Now even if I can't do anything for the rest of the week, at least I can feel a little more ease when I walk through my house and that I don't have to see the mess of cookbooks and messy shelves. And that alone is worth it to me