("Leave It Better Than You Found It Part I" can be found here.)
What would it feel like to go to bed each night this month knowing your home is a little nicer than when you awoke that morning? This past few weeks I’ve challenged myself to spend 10-20 minutes a day in making our home a little nicer, neater, cleaner, or otherwise improved.
If you take on a similar challenge, feel free to make up your own rules, but here are the parameters I gave myself:
1. The time spent in household betterment can’t be stolen from other priorities. It needs to be time I’d otherwise fritter.
2. I can’t count keeping up on routine responsibilities as part of the betterment. Regular weekly laundry or cleaning is just breaking even, not getting ahead. To "win" at this I have to keep up on the routine stuff, and do a little something more each day.
3. The entire state of my home is considered as I weigh whether I’ve left it better than I found it. If I organized a cupboard beautifully, but have fallen behind on laundry, or caused an avalanche in a closet, then I’ve not left things better overall.
And finally, not really a "rule" but a tip: I try to remember to step back and evaluate the big picture every week or so. One week I felt like I’d been successful each day, but at the end of the week realized I hadn’t really bettered the overall picture. It turned out I’d counted things that were really just breaking even, such as cleaning up the messes we’d been creating. I realized that I’d counted unpacking and putting away things from a trip to the mountains–something that needed doing to be sure, but only put me back at our starting place, not ahead.
Understand that some days you won’t win at this. Life has ups and downs and some days it is all we can do to not get further behind. Other days we can only hope to not get too far behind! Winning at this isn’t worth the cost of losing in more important areas.
It can be as mundane as cleaning behind the refrigerator or dusting out the china cabinet. It could be cutting new drawer liners for the dresser or polishing the candlesticks. You might refinish a table, or sew a new window valance, or just clean the ceiling fans. Tame that chaos by decluttering, decorating, or dusting. Enjoy the thrill of knowing you can thwart the second law of thermodynamics and establish beauty and order!
Domestic Chaos Tamer and Homeschool Mom of Five, Dell writes about home, heart and hearth.
