I’m so over feeling hot and sweaty. I’ve been putting off great multitudes of household tasks because I couldn’t bring myself to even imagine doing them while it is this hot. I finally had to relent on this wonderful system of Doing Nothing today. We needed clean clothes.
You would think this was a simple task, right? Just throw a few things in the washer, set it going and then go back to the couch to watch some poufy pink Barbie movie with my daughter. Not so fast.
First I had to find the dirty clothes.
And yes, I’m that far behind.
I collect laundry baskets - and then never use them. Consequently the dirty clothes were in every imaginable corner of the house, and none of them were sorted or put the right way out. So before I could even load up the machine, I had work to do. I sorted for a full half hour (and I still didn’t get it all done) and then I threw on the first load. While they were going, I moved on to the loungeroom.
We have an L-shaped loungeroom with the ’short end’ (off the kitchen) fashioned into a sort of office area. Only my laptop isn’ t there, it’s at the end of the dining room table. So what does one do with a large expanse of unused desk space? You fill it up with junk of course! I’d been using it as my folding/hanging table but I’d fallen behind by, um, (*whispers*) six or seven loads. As we needed more things I’d just rifled through the baskets which meant that everything still there was either wrinkled beyond salvation or was mixed with the kids’ dirty clothes. I’m nothing if not honest here people!
The stuff I identified as definitely clean, got hung or folded (I’m hoping the wrinkles will ‘fall out’). The area is mostly tidy again. But then I had the problem of where to put the clothes on hangers. Off to the kids’ bedrooms I go. Opening up the built-in robes, I groaned. They were both worse than the office area. So I started cleaning out the robes. I removed all the still-hanging clothes, vacuumed everything out, wiped everything down, and re-hung all the clothes.
Bearing in mind at this stage I’ve been working for over an hour…
Then it was time to switch loads. The first load was Talented Hubby’s work clothes which, given my avoidance of All Things Laundry in the last two weeks, he needed as soon as humanly possible, so they got put in the dryer - something which pained me no end given it is scorching outside. Yeah, I didn’t think that one through very well. Moving right along…
While I’d been hanging up the kids clothes, I noticed the cleaned-out robes made the rest of the room look like a tornado site. So I cycled through the room (with sporadic help from the Piglets) Once again I longed for the day (hopefully really soon) when we can set up Boofah in the fourth bedroom and separate the bunk beds. Making the top bunk is one of my worst ever household tasks, sigh.
Back in the office area, the clean table kind of made the bookcase standing next to it look horribly cluttered. So I started cleaning that off. I realised I had a whole bunch of books I am no longer interested so I grabbed a box and started putting aside some of them for donation. This reminded me of some bagged-up items I already had ready for donation in the spare room/gym room/elusive fourth bedroom so I brought those out and then found myself decluttering a little more in there.
When the dryer finally finished, and one load had made it’s way through from start to finish, I’d cleaned the office area, decluttered a bookcase, cleaned out the kids’ built-in wardrobes, cleaned the kids’ rooms, collected the donations into one spot ready to go and tidied up a little more in prep for Boof to go into his own room.
And this all started with one load of washing!
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