Who has two thumbs and a clean room? Me!

So every week on Saturday the kids must get their bedrooms totally clean. (We've been letting Emma slide on this because her grades are fantastic, but actually I'm cracking down this week. Clean your room, eldest!) The rooms have to be spic and span, vacuumed, dusted, tidied, miscellaneous out from under beds, by Saturday bedtime. But:

• If they're done by lunchtime, they get a fun-size candy bar.
• If they're done first, or if their room is cleaned best, they get a full-size candy bar.

So who gets best this week? That's right, me. I used to wonder, back when I was a kid living in my parents' home, how it was that my elder, married siblings made their kids clean their rooms, but the parents' rooms weren't as tidy. Usually my mom and dad's bedroom was very clean, dusted, etc, though inside the closet there lived a horrific untidy clutter of doom. Why didn't parents have to do the same things kids did?

Then I grew up, and I realized that during the morning when I give my kids time to clean their rooms, I'm making breakfast and tidying the kitchen. When I give them time to put their laundry away, I'm putting in the next load and folding the towels and my laundry just is heaped on the foot of the bed. When I have a box of something I don't know what to do with, it's easier to hide it at the foot of my bed and have a tidy living room than to leave it out until I puzzle where it should go. And kids will fill up my room (and particularly the top of my dresser) with everything that they don't know how to put away.

So the current cleanliness has been the work of many weeks, beginning with husband's layoff and the fact that we had to shift things around to make a working space for him here. I cleaned out [my used-to-be sewing room that was a dump for everything and sometimes we couldn't even walk in it because there were too-small clothes and shoes up to knee level, which former sewing room was being transitioned into a dedicated mud room where we'd keep coats, snow clothes, boots, and the like] to carve out a tiny place for a desk for him. In the process of dramatically changing the purpose of that space, I had to

• sort out years of kids' clothing, keeping just a few and donating most, so I only have a few boxes of things for the youngest four to grow into;
• toss bags and boxes and all kinds of things;
• rearrange my school room, to make the paper/crafts/supplies closet into a coat/snowclothes/boots closet;
• move a bookcase from my bedroom (where I didn't want it anyway) into the schoolroom for paper/crafts/supplies;
• move a filing cabinet from the school room to the living room;
• move everything else that I had no idea about to the foot of my bed.

Also, at the foot of my bed, I had two boxes of things from the bathroom that never got moved back in when the remodel was complete. Ah, chaos.

For weeks I've been chipping away at it. And as of today, every box is emptied, every thing put where it should be, closet very tidy and organized. (That was a big deal, we repurposed shelves torn out of the school room supplies closet into a shoes thing for Blaine, and then the entire closet needed to be shifted and reorganized.) I even cleaned off my dresser top. It may, possibly, have never been clean since we moved here.

Icing on the cake, I purchased a new cute lamp for my dresser, and a cute frame for the print of her artwork that a good friend sent me at Christmas. I have yet to tackle the actual decorating of that room, but until I paint and get new bedding this will do nicely.

Ahhhhh. Such a relief. And I have so much space at the foot of my bed to walk around!

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Now playing: Silversun Pickups - Panic Switch