Summer Cleaning

I just cannot adhere to Spring cleaning, our life is much too busy during the winter and spring months to take a weekend to clean the house. I mean I complete understand why people do it, but I cannot figure out where they find the time.  In my little world spring cleaning is a nice idea but it always gets pushed until the Summer holidays.

Yes, yes I get it, summer holidays are for fun and relaxing and not busting yourself trying to do things that are boring and monotonous.  This all makes sense if you work a regular job where you only get two weeks off in the summer.  No way would I, or did I, want to clean my house as part of my summer holidays.  It just wasn't happening!

Now that I have a teaching job and all of my summers are off I have to find things to fill the days.  If I could just ignore the cries of "what can we do?" "I'm bored" "Can I watch tv" and get lost in all the books I am trying to read this summer (there are 14 titles) then I could probably avoid spring cleaning in the summer.  But those cries from my children, in which they want me to be a stage monkey I am sure, providing them with countless hours of entertainment while they turn into zombies is not my ideal way to spend my summer.

So cleaning up those areas of the house that we never seem to get to any other time is what is on the agenda for part of our summer holidays.  And I break it down into three or four tasks a day so that it is manageable and our whole day isn't spent cleaning, because that's not how I want to spend my summer either.

before 

Yesterday was the first day since my surgery that I felt like I should start tackling some of this stuff.  So I decided to tackle my kitchen. I have this love hate relationship with my kitchen.  I love to hate it, all of it! I will never have a kitchen built like this again, I like open kitchens once you have two adults in there there is no room for anyone else and the cupboards.... they completely drive me batty, they are always getting messy and are never organized so that was my task, organizing the kitchen cupboards.

after

before

These corner cupboards are the bane of my existence in my kitchen they are always cluttered and things just don't fit properly in them, and those large drawers, although a good idea in theory are just asking to get messed up.  So starting in one cupboard and making my way to the other cupboards I slowly cleaned my way to being organized.

before

after

After

I also tackled my other tupperware draw and cleaned our so many lids that were missing bottoms , I guess that's the only real issue with organizing things you realize how much stuff you have lost or that has been thrown out over the year.  Hopefully this new system of keeping the lids with the containers will help to keep things more organized and not allow our tupperware draws to look like a collection of plastic lids.

Now just to get my family on board with keeping things organized!!!