Cleaning Your House After It Has Gone to the Shitter

Put the flame thrower down and the gasoline back in the shed. Your house might appear to be unrecoverable, but you would be amazed at how applying a little organization to your cleaning will make the daunting task much more rewarding.

To start out, you will want to organize your cleaning. What, you say? That’s right. You will want to organize your cleaning.  You will need a:

• garbage container(s) (One upstairs and one downstairs)
• recycle container(s) (One upstairs and one downstairs)
• laundry pile (s) (Near the washing machine is a great place)
• donation box (Pick something you don’t mind getting rid of, otherwise you will have an additional step of moving things to another container later.)
• things that go upstairs box (Laundry baskets work great for this)
• things that go downstairs box

In later steps, you will want to focus on individual rooms, but to get this party started you will want to gain some sanity first.   Be the tornado. If you have a multilevel house, pick a floor to start on and move to the next once complete.  Grab everything you see that obviously belongs in one of the boxes and put it in. If you have to fret about it for more than 5 seconds, save it for phase 2.

You should have some rather full containers by now.  Take all the trash and recyclables outside to the bigger bins.  If the donation box is full, put it in the car, so you can take it with the other goodies when you are done.  Carry things that go downstairs/ upstairs to their appropriate floor and put them away the best you can.

Before you take a break, toss a load of laundry in and sweep/vacuum the floors.  You will want to do this now, because you might be too exhausted to continue and these last few steps will have your house looking like it is moving in the right direction.  After you catch your breath you will want to proceed to conquering one room at a time.  Sounds like another blog topic to me.