I’ve spent so much time organizing and fixing things in my house in the last two days!  You know how this little thing breaks and that little thing and before you know it seems everywhere you look you have projects waiting for you and you have no desire to attend to any of it because it feels overwhelming?  That’s how I was feeling but two days ago I decided to tackle some of them.

When we changed all the bedrooms around at the end of July, dd13 inherited what used to be our master bedroom suite, with its own bathroom and walk-in closet. We had used the closet as a home office and had a freestanding closet in the room for storage, but decided to get rid of the home office and restore the space to a walk-in closet.  That project took some time but eventually was done, but the freestanding closet remained.  It was annoying dd because she couldn’t organize her space the way she wanted but taking it apart and finding a place to store it was something I just didn’t feel like dealing with.  A couple of days ago I decided to just do it.

It was a big project by this time because it meant organizing our attic storage area to accommodate the pieces of the closet, reorganizing the walk-in closet and of course moving around the furniture in that room.  It took hours but was so worth it!  The room is better organized and feels much more spacious and I’m really happy to have done this for dd13.

Then I worked with ds11 to clean up his room.  He shares his room with Yirmiyahu, who’s an easy person to share with since he makes no mess.  🙂  He also shares with ds15 when he comes home for the weekends.  His bed has a second bed that pulls out that ds15 uses, but the problem is that ds15 always has to leave very early in the morning to catch his bus back to his school.  So he can’t put his bed back while his siblings are sleeping, and understandably, ds11 is resistant to having to clean up after ds15.  So things end up getting left out too long and getting messy, and then ds11 feels overwhelmed when I remind him to straighten his room up.  It can make a big difference to work with your kids when they feel like this – it really wasn’t so much work but having me work with him for a half hour shifted ds11’s feeling about it all and after a while he told me he didn’t need my help anymore, he could finish it all himself.  That room now looks great – not a thing anywhere in sight except blankets on the bed and in the crib.

This  morning I called a real estate agent to talk about selling our apartment.   She feels based on our timeline – we want to move by the beginning of September – that we need to move fast to get our home listed.  So she’s coming tomorrow to take pictures.   I wasn’t expecting this to happen so quickly.  Obviously it’s important that everything looks really neat and It was especially good that I had done so much work the day before or I would have been really stressed at all that I needed to do today to get things in order!

I still had plenty to do today!  I had started the playroom yesterday but of course there was still more to do because that’s how playrooms are 🙂 and I finished it up today.  What I’ve been doing is more like Pesach cleaning and organizing for the move as I clean, not just straightening up so it’s quite a bit of work.  At this level there’s a lot of effort spent on things you don’t see.  Now that room is spotless, with just an easy chair and carpet in addition to the wall closet along the length of the room.  Ds7 commented in suprise that now it’s so empty that his voice echoes when he talks!  (It’s true!)

Then I moved onto the younger boys’ room. Though I clean it daily, since their bunk bed broke a couple of weeks ago it just never looks tidy.  They have their beds lined up three across now, and it doesn’t leave much space to get around.  They like it but I don’t; it makes it much harder to clean.  Dh was home today so I asked him to make fixing this a priority and he did.  It took a good chunk of time since the initial little thing that was broken became a big thing that was broken since we didn’t take care of it as soon as it broke.  That’s how it always is, you don’t gain time by pushing things off because in the end it takes so much longer than it would have taken if you had just done it right away .  Amazing what a huge difference fixing the bunkbed made!   I did the same cleaning I always do but now the room looks spacious and neat again.

I also did things like scrubbing walls, plastering holes and bleaching my bathtub.   In case you’re wondering why it was necessary to bleach the tub – which I’ve never had to do until today in over 20 years – a few days ago ds6 and ds7 were playing in the tub and wanted to scrub some items and used steel wool (which I didn’t see they were using – I didn’t think I had even had any left!).  They played for a really long time, leaving the tub filled with water all that day, which I didn’t mind.  But when I finally emptied the tub, the tiny shreds of steel wool had left tiny rust specks on the bottom of the tub.  

Of course after all of this work in different rooms, I didn’t put in the usual time in the living room and kitchen so it was a little discouraging to have worked so long all day and then those rooms still needed more attention to be camera ready.  But I’m hoping to get up early in the morning to get those things taken care of, and wake the kids up early for breakfast so I can clean up the morning mess before the agent comes.

Our agent said she wants to bring the other 15 – 20 agents in the city for a meeting to look at our home so they’re familiar with it – I asked her to wait until next week for that.  I really don’t like people coming into my personal space.  Obviously an inherent part of selling your home is that you have to do that, but it’s hard for me.  No matter how much cleaning and organization I do, my house doesn’t stay looking spotless more than about 25 seconds.  I have too many people doing too many things around the clock, so it can’t.   Sometimes I have to remind myself of that, and tell myself not to worry about what anyone else thinks.  Once I feel okay with myself, I don’t give so much power to what others think of me.  

I look forward to sharing with you that the sale process has gone quickly and smoothly!

Avivah