Friday: Cleaning Day

I'm so proud of my accomplishments today! Usually, I vacuum and clean the bathroom and call it done. And this week I've been especially lazy and behind because I just came back from a wonderful week and a half at Josh's parents' house where my only chore was laundry! But after reading some controversial posts on housekeeping, (which I was going to link, but they have been removed due to their controversial nature), I was re-energized and ready to go.

I cleaned off my "Pampered Chef desk/place where we put things small enough or sharp enough that Olivia would hurt herself with them" and moved the turtle and crab there so that they're finally out of our bedroom! That's something I've been wanting to do for a long time. They used to be on our dresser, which I was always upset about because I'm so proud of the fact that our bedroom furniture matches, I hate to mess it up by making half of it host to creepy crawly reptiles and such. Also, it makes it really hard to dust when you have to move habitats around. And the Pampered Chef desk was cluttered with assortments of forgotten mail, paper clips, broken necklaces, etc.

Oh, but the real pride behind my accomplishment lies in the fact that in order to clear off the PC desk, I had to first clear off a shelf on our one and only bookshelf to fit the PC binders and paperwork. And in order to do I had to clear off the computer desk to see what would fit on the shelf with my PC stuff (the computer desk was littered with all kinds of papers and books with titles like: "Multivariable Control Systems" and "Principles of Mathematical Analysis".

So I didn't think I'd blog about something as dull as this, so I didn't think to take any "before shots", but afterwords, I felt so proud of myself I had to document the occasion with pictures and a blog. So here's my clean apartment! (Or rather, the parts of my apartment that are clean.) :-)

Here is the finished bookshelf. (The shelf I cleaned was the top one - I know the others need help as well, but that's another Friday). I know it still looks cluttered, but I promise it's a lot better than it used to be! I'm just simply amazed we're making do with only one when we had three in our last apartment. But that's when we had an office and could put up really cheap black plastic Wal-Mart shelves and just tell company not to look. Now our "office" is in the living room.


Here's the cleaned off computer desk! Sigh, see the beautiful wood? There's so much of it, too! I'm pretty sure before I started there wasn't any wood showing.


And here's the former Pampered Chef desk. Again, you really can't appreciate how nice this looks because you can't compare it with what it was before. But trust me, this is a HUGE improvement! But best of all....


Here is the new and improved non-animal habitat dresser! I was so proud when we got it because it came with a matching bed (matching furniture *gasp*!). And it was all a gift from God through the secretary of the school where I taught. She was moving and was going to throw it out! But again, notice the nice shiny wood. Sigh.

But now I'm starting to feel guilty because I should have been cleaning the bathroom during Olivia's nap, but instead I just sat and was satisfied with what I'd already done. I suppose Josh did just clean out the tub yesterday (Olivia still thinks the bathtub is a toilet). But I should go do the rest of it while Olivia is still napping.