Daily Deslobification BlogCast – A Slob Comes Clea

I can’t believe this podcast has been going for a DECADE!!?!? What in the actual world? Today, I’m sharing the timeline of how it formed and grew. I’m also sharing how thankful I am for y’all! Mentioned in this episode: Enter the ten year giveaway!  Take Your House Back is on sale right now for […] The post 383: 10 Years of the Podcast appeared first on Dana K. White: A Slob Comes Clean.

That’s a how-interesting-so-that’s-the-way-it-works kind of “huh.” Not a Texan version of “Pardon me?” I love (affiliate link alert) my dishwand. I’ve blabbed about it already this week. And I really love using my favorite mug to keep it clean and dry and out from under dishes in the sink. But alas, about three weeks after I’d come up with this oh-so-fabulous-and-couldn’t-be-any-more-perfect solution, my face fell when I saw it in the bottom of the sink, its handle in the garbage disposal. I’m not sure how it got there, out of its designated home. I could probably pin it on one of the kids, but it’s not like I’ve never done that. By “that” I mean: come up with a perfect solution/spot/routine, and then life happens and I don’t put the item back in that spot and all is lost. The “all is lost” part is overly-dramatic, but it’s how I roll. I think that attitude is why the “place for everything” concept that Fancy Homemakers chant with a smile makes me tilt my head slightly while my eyes glaze over. I felt the sadness of another failed solution, another not-put-back-in-its-place item, but then I realized I didn’t have to be sad. I didn’t have to mourn another System Gone Wrong. All I had to do was put the dishwand back in the mug. Which is so much easier than crying. Y’know, with the tissue and the blotchy face and the runny nose and all. And it hit me that A Place for Everything is how people pick up their houses so quickly. They don’t have to moan or groan or stare at an item for ten minutes wondering where to put it. It’s not that nothing EVER gets out of place. It’s just that when it does, there’s an angst-free place to place it. Getting rid of A LOT of stuff and asking myself my two (and ONLY two) decluttering questions means most of my stuff does have a place. (Not all, but I’m excited to say most.) My dishwand has a place. So put it there. Huh. Pretty easy. Who knew? Are you part of the Kitchen Cleaning Club on Periscope? You should be. It’s fun. They’re live videos where we can interact while cleaning our kitchens. Here are the older ones. Follow me in the Periscope app @ASlobComesClean and you can be notified so we can clean our kitchens together in real time!   Podcast listeners click here.

Viewing every random straightening task as a full blown decluttering project. That’s ONE of my problems. As my Slob Vision cleared while I got the kitchen out of Summer Survival Mode, I shook my head and realized the spread-out-edness of all the stuff on the kitchen cabinet might be contributing to the overall messiness of the kitchen. Might. So I took the 2.5 minutes necessary to straighten the area. Things I know from experience: “Straightening” will make a huge impact. No need to consider it a decluttering project. Thinking of it as a Decluttering Project might would justify procrastination. Y’know, because if it’s a Project, I need to block off time, and blocked off time needs to be put on a schedule rather than done right now. Oh, how I love putting things on a schedule. I love it so much more than straightening. Straightening this area takes a whole minute or two. Three tops. I have proof in other posts. It’s the blessing/curse of Slob Blogging. Once I was looking at the area, Slob Vision Blinders removed, I saw the big ol’ bottle of conditioner. Yay for kids who bring in Costco hauls from the car! Can’t really blame them for missing the obvious need to take the conditioner to the bathroom when Mama didn’t see it either for a few days. So I took the conditioner to the bathroom right then. Even though this WASN’T a decluttering project, Decluttering Question #1 still applies. The big ol’ bottle of Olive Oil went to the other side of the kitchen where I’d look for it. If I needed it, and it was still in this Kitchen Blindspot, there’s a 50 95% chance I’d search frantically everywhere but there and groan loudly about how I just knew I’d bought some the last time I went to Costco. I’d probably throw in a few self-pitying phrases like “Why do things like this always happen to me?” and “Seriously?? Who loses a huge bottle of olive oil??!?” Once I moved those Duh Items, I saw this:   A cute little straw holder with no straws in it. Right next to a plain ol’ container where I actually put straws. Cute is good, but who has time to lift the lid thingy? And angle the straws to go in there? I mean, that might take two whole hands and five whole seconds. I got rid of the proper straw holder and went with what works. At that point, things looked better. (Pardon the hand.) Except: The big black speaker. Hubby used that speaker until he saved up his birthday and Christmas money to get a much fancier speaker. The big black one has been passed on to our kids. I guess they were naturally following the “Where would I look for it first?” decluttering question when they put it back there. Except that two feet away (or less) is the nice speaker: So I took it to my boys’ room. Straightening turned into decluttering. Way less overwhelming than officially titling and scheduling it as a Project. And as long as it’s not an Official Project, I don’t have to stress that it isn’t perfect. It’s better. I like better. Maybe this is how Normal People do it? And how they avoid having a long list of Decluttering Projects to do?     Looking for decluttering tips from someone who understands what it’s like to have clutter?  Here’s my ebook!   Podcast listeners click here.

I was so proud of this thing when I bought it. I found it at Costco, but it wasn’t cheap. There also weren’t multiple options like there might have been if I’d gone looking for a salad spinning thingy in a regular store. But I wasn’t looking. I just saw it in front of my face and the proximity alone reminded me how desperately I’d been wanting one. Desperately, even though I had never gone looking. Whatever. Anyway, I bought it. I mean, it’s a really good brand. And just think of the motivation to eat salads! And fruit! This purchase alone will surely change my life. It worked (for spinning salad, not really for full-life-change), but it’s huge. So huge I can’t fit the pieces in my dishwasher. And it took up huge amounts of room in my kitchen cabinet. I wasn’t about to replace (a clutter-busting concept when I can use it) my colanders. I use those all the time. And they fit in my dishwasher. After months of shifting and counter-space-taking (in various states of washed-ness/usability), I stuck it on the top shelf of my pantry. Where it sat, and definitely didn’t get used. As I put away groceries last week, I felt animosity toward this monstrosity (monstrosity is too harsh, but oh so rhymable) and the prime pantry real estate it had claimed. So I finally gave up. I gave up on the idea that this thing would suddenly turn into the wonder-product I’d imagined it was when I bought it. Off to the Donate Box so someone somewhere who doesn’t mind handwashing can use it in their much bigger kitchen. Or at least they can find out it’s not for them for a lot less than I paid for it.     podcast listeners click here --Nony

Before we begin, allow me to address all current/former English teachers/grammar nerds. I was one of you. I have purposely chosen to use artistic license in the title of this post. “Routines as the Things Up to Which I Catch” doesn’t have the same ring to it. And now I’m questioning the pluralization of “routines.” See how it never ends?  I’m getting back into the routine of things. School has been going for almost two weeks, and we’re getting used to it. Summer Survival Mode has ended (though now we’re figuring out Book Writing Survival Mode). As I ran an extra load of dishes here and there last week to try to catch up from the off-routine days of summer, it hit me how much it helps to have something to catch up to. Pre-blog (pre-any-understanding-whatsoever-of-the-importance-or-impact-of-routines), I felt behind all the time. ALL the time. This vague concept of “catching up” meant getting the house perfect. Since getting the house perfect never happened (and still never happens), I never caught up. Knowing I’d never “catch up” zapped all hope and desire to even try. Now, I’m not trying to catch up to what the house looked like in my head before we actually bought it and moved our stuff into it. I’m catching up to a routine, because I have a routine to catch up to. Knowing that my goal is a routine, I can identify and tackle the things that will make the routine easier. Like the baking sheets filling the right side of the sink in the picture above. We need to order a replacement part for my beloved dishwasher. The adjustable top rack isn’t adjusting, so we can’t put tall items in the bottom rack right now. Baking sheets are tall, and over the summer as the kids (fine. the kids and I . . .) depended on frozen stuff for lunches (fine. lunches and dinners . . .), these baking sheets were used A LOT. But they couldn’t go in the dishwasher. Which meant they got piled in the sink and washed as needed. Not a happy truth, but the real truth. Also, the annoying truth. Because no kitchen will ever look “clean” when there are bigger-than-the-sink baking sheets piled up on one side, no matter how clear and clean the sink’s other side may be. As my Summer Brain Fog cleared, I was excited to tackle this not-a-project-at-all-but-totally-feels-like-a-project. Excited, y’all. Not because I can’t stand to see a mess (I have a special gift for not seeing it), and not because I was going to get my house cleaned up once and for all (I now know that isn’t even a thing). I was excited because I have a routine. Even when I’ve gotten off of it, I still have it. I know exactly what to do to get back on track and start seeing real progress. My routine is my motivation to catch up. The routine is the thing I’m catching up to. Once all those big-and-awkward baking sheets are clean and out of the way, my routine makes a DAILY VISUAL IMPACT. So when I took the amazingly short time necessary to do one day’s worth of kitchen work Monday morning, it made an impact. And that impact impacted my mood. So that’s my goal. I’m not catching up on a perfect kitchen, I’m catching up on the routines that enable me to maintain a livable kitchen. Yay for routines.     podcast listeners click here --Nony

I wrote this back in June, but I’m putting it at the top for those who are wondering what is going on around here for summer! I’ve been publishing some fun and inspirational stories from YOU, so keep scrolling to see those! It’s officially-but-not-officially summer!!!! Calendar schmalendar. The kids are out of school!!!! Yeehaw!!! (Read to the end and I’ll give you a tip on how to take a picture like that!) Anyway, if you’ve been around for the last few years here at A Slob Comes Clean, you know I now take summers “off” from this blogging job I created out of thin air back in 2009. Blogging is my creative outlet. My kids need to be my creative outlet for the summer. But, I can’t go completely dark for three months, so rest assured you’ll hear from me here and there. It will just be random. Unpredictable. Whenever I feel like it. (Which is exactly what I love about summer!!) And I’ll still be on Facebook. And I’m liking Instagram a little more these days. I have some ideas for you for the summer. Idea #1: Get in the water with your kids. Not sure about that? Read my practical advice for getting to the pool with your kids here. Idea #2: Teach your kids to clean. Even if it’s a random Tuesday morning and only happens once this summer. It’s worth it. I promise. If you feel clueless on how to go about doing that, I’ve decided that my e-book, Teaching Kids to Clean, will stay on sale for the entire summer. That way, anyone who lands upon this lovely community of supportive slobs over the summer can jump in and get to work with her own kids. No code needed. It’s $3 until Sept 1st. Go here to purchase. You can also browse posts on this subject here. (For free!) Idea #2: Read ASlobComesClean.com. I know. That’s what you’re doing right this very second. But I mean read it backwards. I only suggest this because it’s what people do. Y’all tell me it’s like reading a novel, and that it encourages you to see in “real time” the changes and struggles and successes and failures and re-starts and such that have happened over the past almost-six years of my deslobification process. No quick fixes around here, but real life galore. My Get Started page will tell you how to do that for free, or if you want it in e-book form so you can read offline, you can purchase a year at a time, or the first three years are now together as a set for $25. Read it on your road trip. Laugh out loud and/or gasp at my wow-who-would-put-that-on-the-internet before pictures. If your husband is driving, he will ask what’s so funny (or horrifying) and you can read the parts that will prove someone is worse than you. Just don’t show him pictures until you stop for gas. He needs to keep his eyes on the road. And just in time, I have Year Three in e-book form (finally!). Get Year Three by itself: Click here to start with Year One. Go big and get Years One, Two and Three together. Idea #3: Explore things you haven’t before. Did you know I have a page with all kinds of links to my decluttering posts, both the advice ones and the before-and-after ones? Or check out my free printable cleaning checklists. Have you ever watched my youtube videos? There are a lot of them here, or you can go over to YouTube and watch there. Here’s a playlist of my favorite ones where I play various characters trying to unload their junk on Nony. What about podcasts? All you need to do is hit the play button (the arrow) in the gray bar on these posts linked here, and you’ll hear my voice come out of your computer. Just my voice. Which means you can do the dishes or declutter while I blab on and on about doing the dishes and decluttering. It will be like I’m there with you while you’re working on your house. Except that I’ll actually be at the pool. Idea #4: Get my e-books. They’re instructional. 28 Days to Hope for Your Home will talk you through four weeks of developing four amazingly basic habits that will drastically change your home. Really. Drowning in Clutter? will help you look at your clutter differently and will give you actionable strategies for getting it out of your home. 28 Days and Drowning in Clutter? are $5 each, but you can get them as a set for $8. My e-book, Giving God the Worst of Me, is totally free. No strings attached. I ask for your email address, but even that is optional. If you’ve ever wondered about the backstory of this blog, that e-book tells it. Basically, it is my heart in e-book form. Idea #5: Most of all, though, I encourage you to sign up for my email list. There are two options. You can sign up to get daily emails which aren’t really daily, they just come the morning after I post something on the site. You can also sign up for weekly emails. Those go out on Sunday (while I’m sitting in church) and have summaries of everything I posted in the previous week. By signing up for those, you won’t miss anything that goes up over the summer! And you’ll get a free printable (exclusive for email subscribers) of four basic tasks that will keep your home out of total craziness over the summer. I call it my Surviving Summer ultra-basic checklist.   Photo tip: With your smart phone, take a video of your child flipping his/her hair in the water. Pause the video at the coolest part, tap your phone to remove the play button, etc. and take a screen shot of the paused video. (My friend told me this tip, I didn’t think of it myself!!) This would also work great for action shots like going off the high-dive or down the slide.   Podcast listeners click here. --Nony

I was provided with tickets for my family in exchange for writing this post. It’s summer. I love summer. Summer is all about fun, and this post is all about fun. I am SO excited to host this giveaway for a FOUR PACK of tickets to a Hawaiian Falls waterpark!! Wahoo!!! Hmmmm. How to relate this to cleaning?? Well, even if you forget to do the dishes the night before, you won’t see them all day because you’re at the park, and you won’t even think about them because you’re having so much fun! Now that I’ve made it totally, completely relevant, let me just say that my kids and I love these waterparks. We go every summer. As you know, I’m mostly, kinda-sorta taking the summer off from blogging. Days like the ones we spend at Hawaiian Falls are the reason. I want to be fully there with/for my kids during these fleeting days/years while I have them to myself. All to my greedy-mommy-self. So, when I had the opportunity to go play on the ropes course at one of the parks with some other Dallas bloggers, I took it. I took it because it meant I could offer one of you the chance to be with YOUR kids one day this summer doing fun stuff together. I maybe also took it because I got tickets for me and my kids. Fine. I mostly took this opportunity because it sounded so fun. And it was! I love water rides. I love swimming. But this particular park in W. Settlement, Texas (and one like it in Pflugerville, TX near Austin) not only has water stuff, but also an Adventure Park! Adventure Park = ropes course. Not only can you do the wave pool and the waterslides and the lazy river, you can play on three stories of ropes courses, each story with about ten challenges. That’s included in the price of going to the waterpark for the day. For an extra cost, you can also zipline across the entire park. Like me: I did that. Across the park and back again. Waaaahhhhh!!! Lest you think I’m brave, I took forEVER to step off that platform and I asked and re-asked the worker sixty-ba-jillion times if she was SURE everything was hooked correctly. Fun, but scary. Needless to say, my kids have decided we’re going to this specific park so they can experience the ropes course. Just note that if you go to one of the two with an Adventure Park (W. Settlement and Pflugerville), bring close-toed shoes and clothes to wear over your suit. You have to be dry, and can’t do it in flip flops. If I didn’t know that ahead of time, we’d not be prepared! But you’ll have fun at any of the locations, even without the Adventure Park. I (and all my mom-friends) love these parks because they are amazingly family-friendly. They are small, so it’s easy to set up a meeting spot and get back to it if your family wants to split up for a ride or two. There are also plenty of shaded spots, and sections for younger kids. They also play family-friendly music and offer unlimited drinks for the day for 4.99! Not bad! Oh. And parking is free. All these things give my mama-heart the warm-fuzzies, and these warm-fuzzies got warmer when the owner spoke to those of us at the blogger event. Hearing his heart for this business was so interesting and fun. He is in this business specifically to provide a place for families to have fun together. The comfort and happiness of the mama is top priority. The small size and other family-friendly features are purposeful. So, if you’re in Texas, check out the locations and see if there’s one near you. Or maybe you’re heading to the Dallas or Austin area for a vacation this summer! All you have to do to enter the giveaway is leave a comment below sharing your favorite family summer memory. Enter the giveaway AND go ahead and use these coupons for Mondays and Tuesdays! These are some great savings! Prize Details One commenter will win a four-pack of tickets that can be used for one day’s admission to any of the seven Hawaiian Falls waterpark locations, all located in Texas. Most are in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, plus one near Austin. Hawaiian Falls will provide the tickets and will mail them directly to the winner. Giveaway details You are allowed one entry. The prize is four one-day tickets to any Hawaiian Falls location, valued at $107.96. Tickets must be used in the summer of 2015. All parks are located in Texas. The giveaway is open to people living in the continental U.S. Enter by commenting on this post directly. The giveaway will close on Sunday, July 5th at 10 p.m. Central time. The winner (chosen randomly) will be notified via email, and will have 48 hours to respond to the email. If a response is not received in that time, another winner will be chosen. See all giveaway policies here. Podcast Listeners Click Here (to see the post and enter!) --Nony

Father’s Day was Sunday. This year, Hubby got a new mower! Toro happens to have a really cool one that takes up significantly less storage space AND we needed a new mower AND it just so happened to be Father’s Day. Translation: This is a sponsored post for Toro that came at just the perfect time! This was the Lawn Equipment Storage (etc. etc.) section of our garage. Scary, huh? Way back in there, you can see the mower we had been using. It was borrowed, and was a TORO. We borrowed it when our other one died. Hubby loved it, and was therefore ecstatic when he found out he was getting a TORO of his very own. But his new one, the Toro Recycler with SmartStow has a special feature. It can be folded up and stored standing upright, taking up significantly LESS space. LESS storage space. And that part makes ME happy. In my head, before I actually went out and looked (really, really looked) at the space, this was going to be a simple matter of taking out the old, borrowed, space-taking mower and replacing it with the new, compact one. But to get the old mower out, I couldn’t ignore/avoid-moving all the other stuff other junk. Really. I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried. So I decided I might as well declutter that space. It was as good an opportunity as any to clear my Slob Vision and tackle a corner of the garage that I generally ignore. What I purged: Top Left: Kitchen Cabinet Doors that I totally believed I’d use to make something cool. Behind those, the kitchen vent I kept for some strange reason when we got a new one. Those things are in the Donate Pile now. Top Right: The Thing I Don’t Want to Talk About. Fine. It’s a crazy contraption I bought off a random website after finding mouse poop in the garage right after we moved into this house 9 years ago. Hubby communicated his skepticism about this item non-verbally when I bought it. Hubby’s raised eyebrows and smirky mouth were right. It was a VERY stupid purchase. Bottom Left: A kiddie rake. Our kids are big enough for big people rakes now. (And they no longer view raking as a game.) Bottom Right: An edger given to us by someone who tried to sell it in his garage sale. We couldn’t get it to work. But we kept it. For, like, four years. Ahhhhhh. Fewer things, and less ground surface covered. Mama’s happy about that. Daddy’s happy about his mower. So what does Hubby think of the Toro Recycler with SmartStow? He really loves it. While my own favorite feature is the shiny redness, he got a little more specific. It’s easy to start. No priming (I think that’s what he called it) required. Just pull the start cord. The gas cap is attached. No losing possible. Evidently, this has been an issue in the past . . . It’s very easy to adjust height. There’s a place to hook up the water hose on top so you can wash off the blades without awkward positioning. It’s self-propelled. My 13yo is most excited about this. The old one wasn’t, and he’s in love with this feature. It is specially designed to be stored upright and takes less floor space in the garage. (Hubby doesn’t care about this feature nearly as much as I do, but he does think it’s cool.) And here are Hubby’s thoughts on video: (If you can’t see the video, click here.) And, as promised in the video, a more realistic, panned-out view of the result: Right. This was just a small chunk of the work needed. Unfortunately, my kids have talked me into having a garage sale to get rid of their old bikes and SO much more. I’m thinking of ways to get out of that . . . And in case anyone notices the big difference in winding-up techniques of the green cord vs. the orange cord, the orange cord was wound by Hubby. The green by me. Yes. I have issues. Never even noticed until I saw it in the photo. Disclosure: This was a sponsored post. Toro provided us with the mower and I’m being paid for my time creating this post. All experiences, opinions, messy garages and lame cord-winding techniques are mine. Podcast listeners click here. --Nony

Attention: This is NOT a sponsored post. I’m not being paid a dime to write this follow-up/reality-check-report from a post I wrote in December (which was a sponsored post). I am using an affiliate link, though. Back in December, I got a new toilet. It’s the Optum VorMax from The Home Depot. It’s a “high-tech” toilet, and has features that are supposed to keep it cleaner. I was excited to have a shiny new toilet to replace my old and wobbly one. But let’s be honest. Easier to clean? Is that really possible? I did see immediate difference due the lack of a rim on the toilet. No rim means no place to get scary-nasty. I also saw how it flushes differently than other toilets and could understand how that would make a difference. If you want to see the flush in action, go see the original post about it here. But the only way to truly know if one toilet is easier to clean than another is to use it. Like, use it use it. For a long time. I’ve now had this toilet for five months, and it has been used. Like, used used. So is it different? Is it actually easier to clean? Yes. It really is. While I’ve learned I don’t really love a taller potty (like some of you warned me I wouldn’t), I’ve also learned  there are quite a few features I didn’t even notice at first that really do help it stay cleaner. As a persnickety Slob Blogger, I challenged the toilet by purposely NOT scrubbing it until I saw something that needed scrubbing. I don’t recommend this. (I know from way too much experience that bathroom cleaning is much easier if you go ahead and scrub regularly whether it “needs it” or not.) Five months later, I still haven’t scrubbed it for anything other than “special circumstances.” I won’t describe the details of “special circumstances” but what I’m saying is that for five months, it hasn’t gotten a ring around the potty. But let’s talk about the “easier to clean” features I didn’t even notice at first. I didn’t notice them until, while wiping down the toilet (which I did do weeklyish over the past five months), I didn’t have to bend over and put my face scarily near the toilet to clean those wee-wee-collecting spots at the base of the toilet on each side. I also didn’t have to scrub all around the place where the seat and lid attach to the toilet itself. See these pictures? They’re random day pictures. Not that every day is that naturally free-of-pee. But when it does need wiping down, it’s generally only the wipe-downable spots that need wiping. Confused? If you are an all-girl household, go read this post about making cupcakes. But if you have boys, you may know what I mean. The thing that makes a toilet “hard to clean” isn’t what you can see, it’s what you can’t see. Or get to easily. It’s all the places where two parts meet and cause a little gap. I now realize that the ickiness on the sides of the toilet base likely comes from “liquid” getting to the hinge and dripping through the holes down the side of the toilet. I assume. I don’t know exactly. I just know that in trying to figure out WHY this doesn’t happen with my new toilet, I noticed that the hinge is significantly different from the hinges on my other toilets. The hinge is designed to block “stuff” from getting into the hard-to-clean places. So it’s not that things don’t get messy, it’s just that the places that make you want to lose your mind on Bathroom Cleaning Day are protected and therefore don’t get as messy as easily. Make sense? Again, I’m not trying to sell you a toilet. I just know that I’m super-skeptical about anything that claims to make cleaning easier, so I’d want to know how it has worked in the long run. I was also quite surprised in December about how many people were excited to talk about toilets, so I thought I’d continue the Potty Talk. If you’re in the market for a new toilet, I do recommend looking for some of these features. I also recommend, as one of you commented last time, that you check your pride at the customer service counter and SIT on any toilet you’re considering purchasing to see if the height is right for you. I did look for “easy clean toilet lids” on Amazon, but they didn’t have any pictures with the lid raised, so I couldn’t tell if the hinge design is like this one. Next time I need to replace the seat on one of our other toilets (like I did in this post), I’ll try one.   If it sounded sexist when I suggested girls go read about cupcakes, I’m sorry. It was the first non-toilet-kid-friendly post that came to mind. Go read about hosting water balloon fights instead.   Podcast listeners click here. --Nony

NOTE: This giveaway has closed, and Brittani A. was the winner! Summer starts in less than a week!! Yaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!!! Can you tell I’m excited?? Oh, how I love summer. I love pretty much everything about it, but it does present some challenges. Swim towels everywhere? Magically disappearing flip-flops?? How about using up every single drinking glass in the cabinet before 2 p.m. because we can’t remember whose is whose so everyone just grabs a new glass every time he/she is the slightest bit thirsty?? Yes. That’s a real problem in our house, especially when four of us are home all day every day. It was easier when we used plastic cups and could designate a certain one for each person. But I decluttered those. (Not that we haven’t collected more since then.) I am a big fan of using glass glasses. Grown-up glass glasses. I firmly believe I can taste the difference as an ice-water connoisseur. But, as one of you commented recently on that post . . . pretty, matchy-matchy glasses present their own problem: they all look the same. As someone who believes every single time that she’ll remember exactly where she placed her glass, but then questions herself every single time and therefore grabs a new glass every single time, it’s a real issue. So when DrinkBands offered to sponsor a post and a giveaway, I thought it was a great time to try out their solution for this exact problem! They sent me a set of 9 DrinkBands. They came in a cute little case, which I’m keeping to avoid having the extra ones scattered around the kitchen. They look like the plastic bracelets you’ve probably seen, except they say “That’s my drink!” and come in a set with all different colors. We have bracelets, but we generally end up with six of the same color. You can purchase them individually for around 2.00 apiece or in the set like I got for 15.95. (That’s also the set you could win in the giveaway below!) I chose the colors that were the same as our Magic Bands from our Disney trip in December. Everyone remembers that color, so it worked well for us. I went ahead and put them on glasses in the cabinet. “Ummmm, Mom? Why are there bracelets on our glasses?” was a good reminder to explain the new system. So how is it working so far? It’s working well. There are two of us who are the worst use-at-least-three-different-glasses-each-day-because-we-have-no-clue-which-glass-was-ours offenders. I’m one of them. For me, I’ve been using the same water glass for two days now. The same ONE water glass. This is big. I started to put it in the dishwasher and then thought, “No. I want some icewater now, and I can keep using it for another day anyway since it’s just water.” For the woman who can go through six glasses without even thinking about it, this is really good. Like back when I had a big plastic cup I knew was mine and only mine, that little orange band at the bottom of the glass serves the same purpose. And the kid who takes medicine more than once a day has stuck to his green banded glass instead of filling (literally) the countertop with used glasses. He actually told me he’s been consciously trying to use his designated glass. It really does make a mental difference. Yay for that! And they are dishwasher safe. (Though I’ll be moving the band down since there’s some dishsoap residue in the indention on the glass that’s under the band.) We’ve tested that. Not sure how they will hold up over the long term going through the dishwasher, but they did great on the three or four washes we’ve done. Tips: Have your kids decide if they like the positioning of the band by gripping the glass before they pour something in it. Once the bands are on, they’re secure. They can be adjusted, but if you try to adjust them while there’s liquid in the glass, a mess will likely definitely happen. They’re also good for designating water bottles in an icy cooler that can cause marker to rub off! Edited to add: I didn’t realize that you can personalize the bands!! Have your names or nicknames put on the DrinkBands!!! They’re only 2.50 each when personalized!! How cool is that? I love that this company is owned and operated by a family with five kids of their own! Yay for entrepreneurial families who come up with smart solutions! Ideas for giving these as gifts: for Grandma who hosts the grandkids over the summer and gets a little frazzled because she long ago outgrew the random-plastic-cups-from-random-kids’-meals stage of life. for the mom who is having her third or fourth (or fifth or sixth or more) baby and who would appreciate the acknowledgment that bigger families present their own fun and unique challenges. for the awesome friend who lets her home be your vacation destination and embraces the awesomeness of having LOTS of kids in the house. Go check out this pack I got and the camo pack. The winner of the giveaway will get to choose between those two packs! Oh, and if you go ahead and purchase one of those, but then win the giveaway, you’ll get a refund! To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment below sharing your biggest summer cleaning challenge. Prize details: The winner of the giveaway will choose between a set of 9 drinkbands in various colors valued at $15.95 or the set of 5 Camo ones valued at 10.50. Giveaway details: One winner will be randomly chosen from the comments on this post. DrinkBands.com will provide the prize and will ship it directly to the winner. Winner will be contacted via the email that is entered upon commenting (but which is not visible to the public). Once contacted, the winner will have 48 hours to respond or another winner will be chosen. One entry per person. See all giveaway policies here. Comments must be left on the post itself. Emails and Facebook comments will not count. This giveaway will end at 9 p.m. Central time on June 9, 2015.   Podcast Listeners Click Here --Nony

Sometimes I have the ability to see into the future. I see Future Me, deciding at the last minute to make mac ‘n cheese for dinner. (Because mac ‘n cheese is what I make at the last minute.) Future Me is in a hurry. She’s a little frazzled. She grabs the box from the pantry and rushes to the stove. While she is trying to do a thousand other things, she grabs the box and starts to tear it open. And then she stops (even though she does NOT have time to stop). She sees the partially-already-opened box and shakes her head, trying to remember if she already started to open it. She knows she didn’t. But maybe she did. Oh how she despises these what-happened-three-minutes-ago-I-have-no-earthly-idea moments. She probably did open it. But what if she didn’t. What if some scary person opened it before she bought it and replaced the shells with, like, poison noodles??? She doesn’t want to be crazy. But what if this is THE one time when her Brand of Crazy would save the lives of her entire family? Being crazy or dying of pasta poisoning. It’s a tough decision for people like her. But Now Me had mercy and spared Future Me all this weeknight drama. I opened it. Then I decided we were going to have something else. So I put it back in the pantry. But I wrote a note to Future Me right on the box. No, you didn’t just open it five minutes ago. No, you are not the victim of attempted murder. Just read the note, calm down, and feed that family.   Do you suffer from your own special Brand of Crazy?? Podcast listeners click here. --Nony

Continuing my Saturday challenge of doing Two Things at some point in a busy day, I decided to tackle my Junk Drawers. Remember them? I decluttered them long ago, in this post where I first came up with my two decluttering questions. They needed re-decluttering. Oh boy, did they. My clue that it was time was not so subtle. When you can’t close a drawer, it needs to be decluttered. Just the kind of life-changing organizing advice you were hoping for when you came here today, huh? But when I opened up the drawers, I was completely overwhelmed. I mean, I’d decided to do two things. Two things doesn’t seem like it should be that bad. But these two things? These two particular drawers? Blergh. I told myself to end with less than I had when I started. Less. That was my goal. Not perfection, not even finishing, just having less. The best way to achieve less? Pull out random stuff and stick it in the Donate Box or the trash. Top left: The random Christmas decoration that wasn’t used in ’14 and never made it back into the attic in ’13. Top right: A never-used calendar from 2014. Bottom left: Whatever I could cut away from the big tangle. Bottom right: Some poor polar bear whose face was chewed off. I’m sure I stuck him there to save him from Scruffy the Polar Bear Eliminator. Not sure why I didn’t stick him straight into the trash can. Oh well, he’s there now. There’s less in that second picture. I promise. Next drawer. OK. This second drawer seems to have more of the “less” thing going. Things I removed: Left side, top to bottom: Box top expired in ’12. Ugh. Deja vu anyone? Sewing kit I’d look for in the gameroom cabinet. (So I took it there.) Pure randomness. (I threw it all away. It’s ok. I had permission.) Extra batteries for my beloved Key Finders. I took them to the place where we keep batteries. (Which happens to also be where we look for them!!) Right side, top to bottom: Handwipes and swimming earplugs (that I’d look for in a cabinet three feet away). Another box top that I’m sure produced clever musings in my mind in the moment when I took the picture, but that my 41yo mind can’t recall and my 41yo eyes can’t even read to try to come up with more clever musings. Glue sticks I’d searched for desperately a few weeks before (in a drawer on the other side of the kitchen). Another DS charger for the kid who bought one when he couldn’t find this one (or the one I found on my bathroom counter). I can’t call anything I did that day organizing, and I can hardly call it a project. But I did take a few of my Saturday’s awkward pauses to get rid of stuff. Enough stuff that my kitchen junk drawers can easily close. Y’know, so they can properly hide the junk that’s still in them . . . I’m calling that progress.   Podcast listeners click here. --Nony

It was 2:48. I needed to be at my kid’s school by 3:00. The school is five minutes away. It was officially an awkward pause in my day. What could I possibly accomplish in seven minutes? But it was a Monday, and Monday is Laundry Day. And I was rocking Laundry Day on that particular Monday. Really. When Laundry Day is consistent and I’m really, truly only doing seven days’ worth of clothing for my family of five, I do five loads. Two darks (nice stuff; t-shirts/workout stuff), one whites, one lights, and jeans/dark towels. If I can put in a load early enough on Sunday night that I can move it to the dryer and put a second load in the washing machine before I go to bed, I’m shocked at how fast I move through Laundry Day on Monday. My final load of the day had just finished drying. If . . . IF . . . I could get that load folded (straight out the dryer since that method makes laundry magically disappear instead of creating a wrinkly mountain in my living room), I’d be done. Done before 3 p.m. y’all. That’s big. So I tried. Even if I didn’t finish before I needed to leave, I’d be five more minutes down the road to Laundry Success. I’d be proud of myself for not wasting that particular Awkward Pause. I made it. Here’s proof. I didn’t get it put away, but I matched and “folded” an entire load of (not bright) whites. And y’all, that’s the load I hate folding straight out of the dryer the very most! 2:53, and Laundry Day was done. Except for the putting away of that very very last load, but still. Go me. Have you tried Laundry Day? Have you joined the (totally unofficial, dues-free) club? I encourage you to try it. It is THE best way I’ve found to keep laundry under control for my ADD, project-focused-mundane-task-resistant brain. Here’s a podcast about it. Here’s the long version of how I came to figure out that it’s the best way for me. (Including links to the many other methods I tried that were miserable failures.) Podcast Listeners Click Here --Nony

Like almost every mother since the beginning of time, I found myself thinking, “How did my son not see that huge mess??” My 13yo recently had a highly brag-worthy modeling job. The back of his head will appear on the cover of my mother’s book that will release in September. That’s the bigtime, y’all. Anyway, with the money he earned, he had enough to buy a certain flat screen tv he’d been eyeing. It was the cheapest one he could find with the best reviews. Evidently, the 798 pound even-bigger not-a-flat-screen TV we had in the gameroom was the wrong shape. He found this out at a friend’s house when he saw that on modern-shaped televisions, you can actually see the score of the basketball/baseball/football XBox game you’re playing. Huh. Who woulda thought? The square TV cuts that off (along with some other important stuff) . The new TV arrived on an evening when I wasn’t home. Other than dad helping him move the Mammoth Old TV, he set it up all by his very self! He did a great job, other than what seemed to ONLY be obvious to me: the insane amount of dust under the new CLEAR-BASED TV. Clear-based. Like, nothing whatsoever to hide the dust that had been hidden for a very long time. So I taught him. I had him lift his new pride and joy so I could dust underneath. These are the moments when I have to remind myself of a story I told in a recent podcast. I was working at a summer camp, cleaning bathrooms. As bathroom cleaners, our instructions were extremely detailed and I knew for a fact that I’d done every single thing required of me. But when the woman in charge came in, she pointed out the faucets on the sinks. I had absolutely no idea what the problem was with these faucets. I’d wiped them down. I’d followed the directions. I was done. But she explained they weren’t shiny. I had never even noticed. But once she taught me to look for shininess, I noticed. Now, I always notice and I actually enjoy shining the faucets. But someone had to teach me. It’s my job to teach him. Podcast Listeners Click Here. --Nony

It was the next Saturday. I had another small pocket of unclaimed time, and I decided to try my Two Things strategy again. This time, I followed my Visibility Rule the way it’s supposed to be followed. Don’t declutter something guests will never see. Declutter something out in the open that I’ve stopped seeing. Like this: My pantry/breakfast nook. It has been the subject of oh-so-many previous decluttering posts. I removed trash. I called that one thing. One super quick thing. Then I moved on to the pantry: I kept removing trash. Lids for containers that had broken long ago. Expired “extra” mustard brought home because it was free with some other purchase. We don’t eat enough mustard to need extra. And, an empty lasagna noodle box. Empty because it was open ON THE BOTTOM and the noodles fell out onto the floor. Whatever. It’s gone. And . . . not included in the collage (but seen at the very top of the before picture), seaweed. Note to self: Even if seaweed seems like something Hubby would like, buy it in a small quantity the first time. Don’t get it from Costco. Trash removal, things going to other places in the kitchen where I’d look for them first, and a little consolidating/rearranging, and this was the result: Not perfect. Way better. And that was my two things. I had cleared out the mostly-empty chip bags and purged the pantry. But then, I decided to keep going. It was hard to ignore the space next to and below the two spaces I’d just tackled. After straightening, consolidating and moving things to their real homes less than two feet away (this flat surface is WAY too convenient), it looked like this: Far from perfect. Still with a ceramic pumpkin. But oh so much better. So there you go. My two things turned into three things even though they were really probably only one thing. Whatever. I made progress. Go me!!! Podcast listeners click here. --Nony

I started to title this, “More Ideas for Stuffed Animal Storage” but stopped myself. It’s not about storing. It’s about containing. By “it” I mean the way I have to think about my home to keep it from getting out of control. Storing means finding a place (or many places) to put things. Containing means designating a space, and letting that designated space determine how much/many of something we can keep. Here’s the post where I finally understood what containers really are. Here’s a podcast where I blab on about this life-changing concept and how it works. Here’s another post where I explain what it means to see your entire home as a container. Recently, I shared how we contain my daughter’s stuffed animals. One of you commented with a solution I’d never heard before! It’s a product that’s like a bean bag, but you stuff it with your stuffed animals! It contains/limits the stuffed animals, and can be used as a seat or a big pillow. Isn’t that cute? I shared this on Facebook, and another of you mentioned you’d done the same thing with a bean bag cover. Here are some of those on Amazon, though most were not in stock when I clicked on them individually. And I wouldn’t recommend removing the stuffing from an already filled bean bag chair. I tried that once and it made a HUGE mess. Or you could sew your own bean bag cover! Here’s a pattern. I also loved this idea from Tara: She created a “Stuffy Jail.” She said, “We have ‘stuffy jail’ under my daughter’s loft bed. Crates, zip ties and elastic cord. Easy peasy!” I’d love to see your ideas for “contain”ing stuffed animals! Send me an email with pictures at aslobcomesclean @ gmail . com (with spaces removed!).   Also, if you don’t already have it, get my e-book, Teaching Kids to Clean for only $3 through the end of May. Use the code TEACH to get the discount! Go here to read more about the e-book and purchase. Podcast listeners click here. --Nony

I think about this question. I get asked this question. But any decluttering progress I’ve made has NOT been because I had an answer to this question. The best answer is simply, “Less.” I need less. Or fewer. Whichever is grammatically correct for the situation. Less refers to something that can’t be counted. Fewer is used when there is a specific number of things. Example: Less water. Fewer cups. Fewer things. Less stuff. Things can be counted. But when there are so many things that it becomes stuff, counting is pointless. I know for a fact that I’ve kept mousse bottle caps because it seemed logical to keep them. When we travel, you need the lid. Lids disappear, so I should be sure I have one. But I’m not sure I have one. I’m just sure I have more. I can’t have any idea how many I have when the bathroom counter looks like this: It was on that bathroom counter that I found all FIVE of those caps. Five. I can count to five, and five is four too many. But on this counter, I can see if I have one or none or more. I can see it, so I know. I know if I have enough. Takes away the stress of wondering. Takes away a lot of stress.   Oh. And yes, I see that hair hanging off one of the caps in the picture at the top of the post. I thought about applying my limited photo-editing skills to remove it. Then I decided it is what it is. I can’t pretend the random mousse bottle caps in the pile of clutter are pristine. Podcast listeners click here. --Nony

One of my best/for-realest excuses reasons for clutter is I don’t have much storage space in this house. Really. I don’t. I have a tiny coat closet, one cabinet in the gameroom, and a pantry. But y’all, I’ve seen storage CLOSETS in other people’s houses. Like, closets for no other purpose than storing stuff. One house we looked at had, like, FOUR walk-in storage closets. Mmmm-hmmmm. If I only had those, I’d be totally organized. Except I don’t. I have what I have. And since I didn’t become magically organized all the other times when other if-onlys came true, I’m pretty sure four walk-in storage closets wouldn’t do the trick either. One of my big frustrations has been my lack of space to store our Brownie troop supplies. We meet in my house. We have supplies. Those supplies need a home, but I didn’t think I had one for them. So they sat in the floor of my master bedroom. A totally bad idea, but I couldn’t think of a better one. But then, I glanced up from my breakfast table and saw this: Ummm. That’s storage space. I think of it as my pantry, but all the pantry-type-stuff is stored in its twin on the other side of the room. I suddenly realized this legit Storage Space was storing stuff I didn’t even need. Like two coffee makers. Two EXTRA coffee makers. The one on the bottom doesn’t even work. It’s caraffe-less, but even the first cup isn’t hot. THE FIRST CUP, y’all. Why did we stick it in there instead of throwing it out? NO idea. There was also a picnic basket we don’t use, lots of randomly placed napkins and such that could likely be consolidated, and canisters I bought a LONG while ago at a garage sale but never used because I’d have to scrub/de-funkify them first. The fact that I still hadn’t de-funkified them and still didn’t feel like de-funkifying them right then made me realize they could go. Let someone else think they’re cute and actually do what needs to be done to USE them. Moment of Realization: I was storing things I didn’t need, while I “didn’t have room” to store things I did need. Ugh. So, as the Second of Two Things I tackled that day, I cleared out the cabinet to see if it could hold our Brownie stuff. On the top shelf (of the three I decided to purge), I found craft supplies, dog treats, and a cute-but-haven’t-found-a-way-to-actually-use-it basket. The craft supplies were victims of me asking “Where would I stick it?” instead of the much better question: “Where would I look for it?” Once upon a time, this cabinet WAS our craft cabinet. But it’s not anymore. We look for craft supplies in the gameroom. But I (obviously) still stick stuff in the old place sometimes. I took it where we would look for it. RIGHT then. Dog treats? Hmmm. Upon seeing them, I did remember putting them there, but if you’d asked me the day before whether we had any, I would have said we’re out. Wait and see how wrong that was. The basket? Who knows why that ended up in there. Cute as it was, it went straight to the Donate Box. Once I removed all that EASY stuff and put the napkins and such into the basket where they actually go, I had some empty space on that shelf. Aaaahhhh, empty space. Empty space meant I could keep the picnic basket. THERE WAS A PLACE FOR IT!!! I don’t want to talk about the “we never use it” part. And do you see more dog treats peeking out from under the picnic basket?? I pulled out all sorts of randomness, like: Mmm-hmmmm. THAT was worth storing for all these years. I could have returned to the dollar store for another one if we ever needed it. Which would have been . . . never. Some donations. Some trash. And then it looked like this: Clear space. Aaaaahhhhhh. Time to gather the Girl Scout stuff. As I put things in there, I discovered there was quite a bit of trash in the bags and boxes of Brownie stuff I’d assumed were important enough to take up master bedroom space. But after purging trash and consolidating what we needed to keep, it ALL fit into the cabinet I hadn’t even considered a possibility a week before. Not an organizing masterpiece, but I was happy(ish) about this: Happy(ish) because while I was glad to get the Brownie stuff put away, I was irritated that other, non-Girl-Scout-related things were in that pile. In my mind, this project was going to solve the entire pile problem. But, as piles are rarely exactly what I think they are, it didn’t. Hmmmph. But I’m choosing to be glad I did this. I proved to myself that I do have more storage space than I think I do. I just don’t have space to store stuff that doesn’t deserve storing. I’m also glad for my own (oh-so extensive) decluttering experience. Once upon a time, I might have come up with this solution but would have ended up Stuff Shifting. Moving the G.S. stuff into that space and putting the other stuff in a box to be dealt with later. Y’know, when I suddenly stumbled upon the storage space I hadn’t noticed yet in the nine years we’ve lived in this house. But because I have grown to love the feeling of Stuff Leaving, the Donate Box and the trash took care of the things that didn’t have a definite home somewhere else in the house. I made progress. Not a bigger mess. Yay for that.   Podcast listeners click here.     --Nony

Monday morning, my husband drank his coffee out of a cereal bowl. To be fair (to my slob self), our cereal bowls do have handles and could technically be called really big mugs. But still . . . I hadn’t washed dishes since last Friday. I know. I KNOW I have to do dishes. I KNOW it is the habit upon which the state of my home balances. I totally know. But y’all, I had special circumstances. Unique circumstances. (I would love to say really unique, but there’s no such thing. Unique is unique, so degrees of uniqueness aren’t possible. That’s your language lesson for the day week month year.) I have ants. Ants everywhere. Ants marching in lines across my cabinets. No matter what I do, no matter what I scrub or block or remove, the ants keep doing their ant thing in my kitchen. So I’ve been avoiding my sink. Belly up the sink and you’re guaranteed to find an ant crawling on your shirt or your arm or your NECK very soon. blehalalala But guess what happens when special circumstances keep me from doing my dishes? 1. We run out of clean dishes. 2. My kitchen gets really messy. 3. My husband drinks his coffee from a cereal bowl. (A cereal bowl with a handle . . . but still.) Reality doesn’t stop because of my special circumstances. While special circumstances may keep me from doing what I need to do, the results of me not doing what I need to do still happen. Results have no pity. Jerks. But really, though, I’m the Queen of Identifying Special Circumstances That Justify Avoiding Tasks I Didn’t Really Want to Do Anyway. So Monday morning, I used the last of my cinnamon in a desperate attempt to get the blankety-blank ants to stay away from the point where my belly meets the sink. It kind of worked. A few fewer ants made it onto my t-shirt. My cinnamon-stained t-shirt. What special circumstances are you facing that keep you from doing the things that have to be done, no matter the circumstances? Podcast listeners click here. Oh, and if you want to know how to pronounce “blehalalala” just click the play button below to hear this post in audio form. --Nony

I’m rather behind posting some decluttering “projects” I’ve done over the past month. The weather has been beautiful, and we’ve had lots of randomness going on each Saturday. But a few weeks ago, I decided to do Two Things. I knew I couldn’t get EVERYthing done that I should/desperately-needed-to do, but I could do two things. Two small things. Choosing two small areas to tackle gave me the mental freedom to start without worrying about all I could be doing. I followed my own Visibility Rule and started in my Master Bathroom. (Not that the Master Bathroom is visible to anyone but our immediate family.) I cleared my bathroom counter. My bathroom counter hadn’t experienced the benefits of my most basic of basic tasks in a while. That was my goal. Declutter the counter. The counter that had been piled upon for who-knows-how-long. Perhaps the pile started when I multi-tasked and threw on some make-up as I counted change from the Daisy Dues bucket before I ran to the store to get a snack for our Brownie meeting. (Brownies. Which means we haven’t changed the bucket label since we were Daisies.) Once there’s one Piece of Randomness, other Pieces of Randomness join in the fun. Since I needed a Donate-able Donate Box, I chose to make one out of the box full of Kleenex that I had been tripping over for more than a week. I purged the trash first: Right. Clothing tags I’d used as lipstick blotters, packaging that should have been thrown away in the trashcan 2.5 feet from the counter, and that sticky-but-not-stuck-down drawer liner that just wads up in the corner of drawers. And lids from mousse. I could say I have a lot of hair (which I do), but there’s really no excuse. Next, I tossed the Obvious Donations into the Donate Box. Hair product that hadn’t been opened in the time it took to go through five cans of mousse? Obvious. A scarf that always felt a little odd so I never wore it? OBVIOUS once I noticed on the tag that it was made out of RABBIT HAIR!!!! For real. How do they even get the rabbit hair? Do they shave them? Or sweep up their cages??? And once the obvious donations were out of the way, it was time to take things where they go (right now!). The razor went to the cabinet a few feet away where I would look for a razor . . . Hotel shampoo (and more hotel shampoo) went to the guest bathroom where we keep that stuff. The DS charger went to the room of the kid who bought a new charger because he couldn’t find this one. Pens and pencils went to the kitchen drawer where we search (unsuccessfully) for pens and pencils. We never, ever search for them in my bathroom drawer. And yet, every time I clean out my bathroom drawer, we find oh-so-many. Whatever. About 20 minutes later, it looked like this: Much better. Don’t you think? That I let it get this bad again? Boo! Hiss!!! That it only took 20 minutes to clear it and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my mostly-still-clear bathroom counter for almost a month? Yay! I’ll share the second of my Two Things later this week. (And seriously, I’d love to know the deal with the rabbit hair. It’s not “fur” but woven hair. As someone who is allergic to almost everything, it kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies.) Podcast listeners click here. --Nony