Monday Musings - Getting the job done

I thank those of you in advance who do read my blog regularly for STILL reading my blog despite the fact that it is far from regular lately.


I think I may have talked about this before, oh look I did! We all complain (well I sure do) that we have too much to do and so little time and I really do! For real, in real life as Rosebud would say. I am a compulsive list maker, without lists I feel very lost and unhappy. No matter how long the list might be, it is better than no list. Keeping lists is my way of freeing up my mind, once transferred to the list the problem seems more manageable.

I have a list on the side of the fridge with our big projects, house projects that we need to complete or start as the case may be. Here is a sample of that list.

House Jobs
-Put down laminate floors on our main floor (the last place we have carpet)
-Organize the basement (more on that later)
-Clean the fridge and freezer in the basement
-Fix the caulking around the tub, I also have always never been crazy about our upstairs bathroom floor, so add that to the list too
-Empty and go through our cupboards, wash them down and put everything back

Then there is MY list the list of stuff I want to do, the jobs that keep our house humming and from drowning in our own crap.

Jen's List
-Finish putting our Florida pictures in the album, put away our travel stuff (brochures, pressed pennies, menus, miscellaneous vacation schlock)
-Print our recent digital photos and put them into albums, I have not printed since May. Since Papoosie Girl has been born I have been vigilant about putting our photos into albums with white paper dividers on the pages for me to record dates, add captions, etc. My girls love to look at these albums and if I have done nothing else this is my crowning achievement of home organization.
-Sort and put away Papoosie Girl's Grade One work into her keepsake tote
-Craft alert: help the girls glue the damn shells on the wooden frames my Mom bought after we got back from Florida (last summer)
-Put all our extra photos, remember what it was like before digital? You got the photos back from developing and used maybe half of them for albums and family and tossed the rest somewhere? I bought some cute photo boxes with dividers so I can get rid of all those envelopes.
-Figure out what to do with all those greeting cards. I love cards and give them freely and in turn we receive cards. I like to keep them, but this creates a lot of cards in our home. I have two hat boxes full and while I did let the girls use some of our old Christmas cards for crafts we still have many, many cards. They are special to me and I hate the idea of getting rid of them. I think I could purge them though and only keep the really special ones.


The basement is another story all together. I have made attempts in the past to organize our basement. Keep the Christmas stuff together, keep our high school and university stuff in one spot, our Royal Doulton dishes we have never used in one spot, you get the idea. The problem is that when you move into a house you have less stuff than you do say ten years later. As time goes on you stuff your newly acquired crap in every nook and cranny you can find. It is random as long as it is put somewhere. Now ten years and two kids later we need to take a step back and give this basement some thought.

Our basement is not finished and we basically use it for storage. There is a small area we have carpeted for the girls and we have some of those funky IKEA toy storage shelves with bins. The girls can come down and play and get their dress-up clothes any time they want. This area is generally organized and I won't include it in my disdain for the rest of basement.

The basement also has about 25 Rubbermaid totes (no joke) with kids clothes. I keep all of Papoosie Girl's clothes for Rosebud and I keep what Rosebud is outgrowing for my goddaughter. It is a non-stop merry-go-round of clothes shuffling, winter in, summer out, too small in, too big out, next summer, boots for next winter...it NEVER ends.

So between the wall of totes, our holiday boxes, keepsake stuff, photos, dishes we have no room for upstairs, and a husband who keeps the box from every single thing he buys; our basement is getting kind of stuffed around the edges.

How do you keep everything in order? How often do you clean everything out? It has been several years since we did a big clean out, taking everything off of every shelf, purging and putting it all back nicely. When the basement gets too crowded I feel claustrophobic every time I go down to the basement. The rest of the house is fine, peek in my linen closet, open my medicine chest, the pantry is pretty good; but the basement is annoying.

Why I let it annoy me is another story. With all the day-to-day things on my plate the basement hardly seems important, but looky here is a whole blog post devoted to it! Here is the thing, what I have noticed is that when my mind is cluttered I look to my home and what is around me to see where the problem lies, but this time it is my mind that is cluttered. I am wrestling with some stuff that I shouldn't* really blog about and it is weighing heavily on me. Nothing life threatening or earth shattering, just stuff I am not really ready to talk about here yet. Do I stay on the school Council? Do I put up a fight so my daughter can participate in her First Communion with the rest of her class? Do I have another baby? How do I get myself healthier and carve out a bit of time for myself that doesn't involve sitting on my arse reading blogs? How on earth do you get dinner on the table every single night?*

*So maybe I am ready to talk about them a little. Just a little though.

My mind and my basement need a dusting and airing out. These things on my mind are preventing me from being able to concentrate and I hate that the constant narrative that is normally harmless and even enjoyable is now bothering me. I want to be fun and happy and carefree and my big dumb old brain won't let me. There will always be things on my mind, it is my ability to park stuff in the back of the lot that I need to work on. Everyone worries about their house, work and family; it is human nature. I just hate when it gets too near the front and it starts bubbling over in that frothy way.

Getting the job done in my case may involve a lobotomy.